When the EPCOR Board of Directors asked me to lead EPCOR staff on a project to sponsor a study that benefited EPCOR members, I knew it would be a fun challenge to undertake.
CHALLENGE 1
What to ‘study’. EPCOR members look to EPCOR to answer a broad-range of payments-related questions, so I knew it would be difficult to narrow the topic down to ONE topic that interested all EPCOR members. A Board Member made a comment at a Board Meeting – “What I want to know most is what I don’t know!” This comment led to the idea of a Benchmarking Study where EPCOR members could evaluate themselves against one another on payment topics, helping them understand what they do and don’t know about their peer financial institutions. I am very pleased to say that 128 financial institutions (89 banks, 33 credit unions, 4 thrifts and 2 other banking entities) participated in our inaugural study. Their participation led to a great starting point for EPCOR members to begin to benchmark their payments services and strategies against other similarly situated EPCOR members.
CHALLENGE 2
Who to survey. Primary contacts are typically operations contacts from financial institutions. While ‘operations’ is a piece of the payments puzzle, we knew EPCOR needed all areas of the financial institution to respond to make the results worthwhile. EPCOR asked each primary contact to include a ‘team’ of individuals to answer the survey questions, and provided a printable survey to use when leading a discussion about the survey within the financial institution. Using this approach, 72% of the financial institutions respond that Operations was involved in the completion of the survey (not surprising), and 48% had executive management weigh in on their answers, 39% pulled in finance/accounting, 31% compliance, 27% risk movement, 23% product management, 21% audit and 9% marketing/sales department.
CHALLENGE 3
Making the information digestible. With the help of BCMG Consulting, EPCOR continues to offer webinars, articles, conference sessions, summaries and key findings to the payments industry. EPCOR is always looking for new ways to provide this information in a useful fashion to EPCOR members, as well as any financial institution who could use this information to help them understand ‘what they don’t know!’
To purchase a full-copy of the 2017 EPCOR Benchmarking Study, visit www.epcor.org. For more information about the Study, feel free to contact Jen Kirk, VP Industry & Government Relations, at www.epcor.org