First Farmers Bank and Trust: How to do Digital Account Opening

A lot of banks have, I think, either tried or dipped their toes into digital account opening.

Uh, you know, on the surface it sounds really easy.

It's like, "Oh yeah, digital account opening, you know, we'll, we'll put in, uh, you know, maybe we'll, we'll do-- maybe we'll get a, get a program.

We'll kind of automate it a little bit.

Maybe it'll work with our core system, or maybe one of the core-- maybe Fiserv or Jack Henry's got, uh, kind of an add-on, you know, that, that we can, we can make this happen real quick." But one of the biggest issues with digital account opening is fraud.

Uh, managing the fraud is very difficult.

I have heard of, uh, multiple examples of banks kind of, you know, putting the whole system in place, getting ready to turn it on, or turning it on and making it live, and they-- and literally ninety-five percent of what they get flooded with is just pure fraud.

And then they had to shut it down, and it was kind of a, it was kind of a mess.

So, uh, but some banks have, you know, done it and done it, done it well.

So but this-- so I thought this was a good opportunity, a good topic to talk about this.

So anyway, so let's talk about the problem first here.

So-- and I'm gonna-- I'm probably gonna have to make this one a little bit bigger, and it's smaller, and you'll see in a second, but the problem.

So First Farmers Bank and Trust, a three point two billion asset community bank based in Converse, Indiana, had relied on its legacy account opening systems for more than twenty years.

Uh, it required roughly forty-five minutes per account opening, and every account signatory needed to be present, but it worked, you know.

And that is very common.

A lot of banks, you know, the opening process with the-- all the boarding data and the paperwork you have to do, yeah, it could take, you know, thirty-five to forty-five minutes is, is pretty normal, um, at, at a lot of banks, uh, still, you know, to this very day.

Still, uh, it was not an ideal process in today's digital era, so the bank began to explore streamlining options for digital account opening.

"We had to look at our processes," said, uh, Paige Musselman, Director of Retail Products and Innovation at the bank.

"They are set up for how we should be working, you know, in twenty twenty-six?" That's a question she asked.

"So, so are they set up for how we should be working in twenty twenty-six? Uh, just because we have always done it one way doesn't mean it's right for today.

Can we do it better now?" Great questions to ask.

The answer to that question jumped out at Musselman when she heard about, uh, Prelim, an ICBA Think Tank Accelerator alum providing a deposit account opening and customer maintenance platform for banks that handles consumer and business account onboarding across branch, online, and mobile channels from a single system.