More people turn to digital banking services daily, making it crucial for credit unions to balance seamless digital member experiences with robust security. Part of that process will involve credit unions cleaning up their data and preparing for ever-increasing digital-first engagement, according to Jack Henry President of Credit Union Solutions Brynn Ammon.
Ammon met up with host Sarah Snell Cooke to discuss Jack Henry’s latest innovations and how credit unions can be ready for the future by embracing AI and cloud-based technologies.
Disclosure: Transcript below video is automatically generated.
Sarah Cooke 0:00
Hello and welcome to The Credit Union Connection. I’m your host, Sarah Snell Cooke, and we’re here at the live, at the GAC. I’m joined by the relatively new President of the Credit Union Solutions division of Jack Henry, Brynn Ammon. Welcome.
Brynn Ammon 0:14
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Sarah Cooke 0:16
Why don’t you give us a little more of your background as well as talk a little bit about Jack Henry, maybe you’re doing something cool that nobody knows about yet.
Brynn Ammon 0:23
Yeah, that’s awesome. So like you said, my name is Brynn Ammon I, I’ve been the President of Credit Union Solutions at Jack Henry for eight months now. So it’s been eight whole months in my new role, but I’ve been at Jack Henry for 12 years and, and I’ve been in the credit union industry for 25.
Sarah Cooke 0:40
Wow. I did not know that.
Brynn Ammon 0:41
Yeah, I’ve been around for a minute. I, my first husband was in the Navy, so we moved a lot. So I was at five different credit unions, from sea to shining sea, California to Florida and, and so hit, you know, a couple different credit unions in between, before coming to work for for Jack Henry, 12 years ago. Came up through consulting when I came in to work at Jack Henry, my background, my degrees in marketing, though, so in credit unions, I was in marketing, business development, and then transitioned into project management, which I which I loved, and kind of became an accidental technologist somehow. Not sure quite how it happened, but here I am.
Sarah Cooke 1:23
I don’t think I could ever accidentally become a technologist, but good for you! And so I want to start with the big question.
Brynn Ammon 1:32
Yeah.
Sarah Cooke 1:33
How’s the new job going?
Brynn Ammon 1:33
It’s great. It’s great. We’re doing a lot of really exciting things at Jack Henry. And I was telling somebody the other day, this is, in the 15 or so years that I’ve been connected to Symitar and Jack Henry, this is probably the most exciting time that I’ve been aware of in Jack Henry’s history. We’re doing a lot of really exciting development right now. We’re largely made up of an acquisition company. And so for years, we’ve been an acquirer, serial acquirer, quite frankly. And a number of years ago we really refocused our efforts towards innovation, and so we’ve been developing net new, which is something that we hadn’t done previously. And so some of the things that we started developing years ago are now starting to come to fruition.
Sarah Cooke 1:35
Oh, yeah.
Brynn Ammon 1:38
And so you actually are seeing the fruits of those labors now, which is really, really exciting stuff. Some of the things that we’re coming out with are really, really cool, and we’ve got in clients hands, and they’re touching them and testing them and playing with them now. And it’s, it’s pretty exciting. You
Sarah Cooke 2:37
You aren’t going to give us a little, little hint?
Brynn Ammon 2:39
So, we, I’ll give you a little hint. So we’re doing a lot of cloud native development, building things with the cloud in mind, from the, from the ground up, cloud forward, which is unique in this, in this regard, new, unique in the industry, in the way that we’re approaching it, is all about connecting data to the development components to make sure that what we’re doing not only delivers, delivers for our credit unions to be able to have the member experience be beautiful and seamless and, and have, you know, really solid uptime, but also then to leverage data back in to, you know, to the platforms that they have data from…
Sarah Cooke 3:29
Right.
Brynn Ammon 3:29
…So that they can do ingress and egress from both points, whether it’s out of the core or whether it’s out of their card system, or, you know, their mortgage system, or whatever other systems that they might have that they want to pull data from, instead of just having things kind of piece together, but having that all be natively available to the cloud.
Sarah Cooke 3:51
And that’s so important, to be able to, like, parse that data out for your marketing, for your data security, for everything. So that leads perfectly into the next question about data strategy and what should credit unions be looking at and looking for in the future?
Brynn Ammon 4:05
I would say the primary thing to be paying attention to is, I actually used this analogy last night, when, when you go to do home improvements, if you have a ton of clutter in your house, if you’re if you’re a hoarder by nature, and you’ve got all this stuff going on in your house, painting the walls isn’t going to really get you where you want to be, right? So the first thing that I think credit unions really need to pay attention to and focus on is the data that they already own, making sure that it’s clean, making sure that they understand what they have, and putting intentional strategy around how to work through some of the data challenges that they probably have just from years and years and years of processes that have been built up. There’s the credit unions I’ve worked at in my past, and credit unions that I’ve consulted with, for years we didn’t collect Social Security numbers on beneficiaries or on joint owners or, and that, that’s prevalent throughout a lot of credit unions. You knew your members, you didn’t need their social security number to be logged in a field, and so we have that around the system. So really scrubbing through the data, and there’s, there’s no easy way to do that, that’s just, there’s like a pull up your sleeves and just get to work.
Sarah Cooke 5:22
You can’t build an AI bot to go through it?
Brynn Ammon 5:24
I mean, you can build the bot to go through and find some similarities and, but at some point there you might need to, like, have a person, roll their sleeves up and start again. Back to the house analogy, taking out the trash and, you know, so, or putting things in piles. So that’s really, I think the first piece of it is making sure that data is in order in your own house first, and then looking for, for companies to work with that can help you in a secure and stable way, make sure that your data is all in one place, is safe, is secure, and has ability to be connected again, that ingress, egress, both up from your your data sources, and then out to the third parties that you want to connect to.
Sarah Cooke 6:11
And so I mean, having this data, having this power, credit unions can really redefine themselves. Hopefully. I mean not the credit unions aren’t great and wonderful, and they have a great mission and all that. But to really, because for so long, we relied on the member experience being the person across the counter from you, but now the member experiences in 100 different places.
Brynn Ammon 6:32
Absolutely.
Sarah Cooke 6:32
So it’s really an opportunity for them to do that with tech. What do you I mean, if you’re consulting a client, what are you having them look at, choose?
Brynn Ammon 6:41
Absolutely, that’s a great question. We are looking at from, we believe our perspective is about helping our clients stay around corners. And one of the things that we have really started to do with this innovation, and think some of the things that we’re developing right now, is that we believe that we hold the keys to your digital front door. We want to make sure that what we’re developing helps a credit union have that digital presence. Because the reality is, everybody’s going to have more digital users tomorrow than they have today. That’s not going to go away. And so the question is, how do we get from point A to point D in an intelligent way? So again, that clean data strategy to get to, get to clean AI, to be able to leverage AI models in an intelligent way. And then have, have that digital front door be seamless back into your core, and not a side kind of situation, but really, have it be integrated fully, and have all of your, all of your fintechs, and you know, any, any of those appearances be, you know, be fully integrated back into your core stack.
Sarah Cooke 7:51
Or 15 plus side.
Brynn Ammon 7:53
Yes, exactly, exactly.
Sarah Cooke 7:55
So, as we’re looking to the future, what do you think will be the hallmark of credit unions resiliency and security when it comes to their technology and they’re just general member service?
Brynn Ammon 8:07
I do believe that cloud is going to play a huge part in in our credit unions as they move forward, both from a from a resiliency standpoint and from a security standpoint. There is something to be said about having the ability to, to have disaster avoidance from a cloud perspective, and then also opportunities for, for more resiliency around security when it comes to better storage options and backup options and those kinds of things that you can leverage in the cloud differently than you can when you, when you’re on premise. So I think that’s a big component of it. I also think that there is a huge influx, and we’re actually already starting to see it around virtual information security officers. We know that the cybersecurity space is ripe right now. Everybody needs that help, and from a just from a thought leadership perspective and from a, in your shop perspective, but not everybody can afford CISOs, and there’s just not a lot of them out there.
Sarah Cooke 9:17
Right.
Brynn Ammon 9:18
They’re, they’re not graduating at a fast enough pace for anybody to scoop them up, right?
Sarah Cooke 9:23
Yeah.
Brynn Ammon 9:23
And so, so being able to look for, how can I leverage somebody from a virtual perspective or from a consulting perspective? How can I, the more I can outsource, the less I have to manage and maintain on my own, but recognizing that there is still a very important part that you as a credit union have to pay attention to, keep, keep aware of, you know, make sure your your governance policies are up to date and and that you are keeping in mind all of those, all those strategies that, that go into being resilient and being secure and and reviewing them frequently, going over them all the time. Education, education, education, you can’t do too much education with your staff. So those are the big things.
Sarah Cooke 10:07
Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. So I always let my guests have the final thoughts. What are your last words, you want to take away, you want our credit union audience to take away from this?
Brynn Ammon 10:16
I really believe that we are at the beginning of ecosystem disruption as a, as an industry. We’re we’re right now sitting where the, where the industry was, where the credit union industry was pre-internet.
Sarah Cooke 10:31
Right.
Brynn Ammon 10:32
We’re right there. We’re living through it right now, where we’re going to see the way the industry looks five to 10 years from now is going to be completely different than what then what we’re talking about right now. And so I think that having some of those conversations and leaning into what does this look like for me, you know, is going to be, is going to be good, not being afraid of, not being afraid of AI, and not being afraid of what’s to come, and really looking at, you know, how do I partner with, you know, with, with different companies to make sure that if I don’t have the expertise or knowledge on, on my team. And then I think the last piece of that, too, is really leveraging and looking for, for talent that helps build your bench in your institution around areas where you might not have had skill in the past. So a lot of that, you know, AI modeling and, and cloud development and cloud hosting skills, even for, for credit unions that, that have historically been, you know, outsourced everything from a technology perspective. I think most credit unions are going to become technologists, because, again, digital is going to be king, and understanding that, that we have to live in that world, because again, more digital users tomorrow than today. And so working toward making sure that that you have, that you can speak that language, and that you can can service your members in that way.
Sarah Cooke 12:04
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it.
Brynn Ammon 12:07
Absolutely. My pleasure.