September 16, 2025 – Chicago – MoneyLIVE North America
Kimberly Green – Vice President Business Services at America First Credit Union speaks at Business Banking Innovation session, moderated by Paul Mullins – Managing Director, Global Strategic Initiatives (formerly HSBC).
Paul: You’ve got some very recent experience of kind of thinking through these gems.
Kimberli: Yeah, well, we think about digital and what our members, our clients, expect, both consumer and the business side, they want that frictionless intuitive experience and they want to be able to do it, as she mentioned, omnichannel. So, wherever they choose to engage with us, we want to have a very user-friendly and intuitive experience. And I think we’re finding more-and-more that, especially for business owners, from my position at America First, they don’t have time always to come into the branch. They’re busy doing their business and running their empire.
So, they want to be able to onboard with us whenever and however and have products and services in the platform that will meet them where their needs are at. And she (Zarina Tsomaeva) mentioned the complexity of businesses having multiple owners and multiple businesses. And we’ve been super excited at our recent launch of our new digital onboarding platform that allows one business owner to start the process of opening up an account at America First Credit Union from mobile to online. And they can send that to their multiple owners, so they can engage wherever they are at, so they don’t have to be together.
It’s no longer digital onboarding as an option, It’s really table stakes for financial institutions to meet our businesses where they’re at.
Paul: And it’s interesting that you said, you know, you say the multiple owners and how you manage that. And of course, the expectation of the consumer is it’s the same retail experiences you get in commercial and you’re clearly looking to, to tackle that in terms of the way in which the, the journey goes. I mean it, it leads us really on to kind of what are the biggest hurdles that you need to overcome when you’re trying to streamline onboarding and what was the experience?
Kimberli: Our biggest hurdle as we were looking for the right fit, we knew we needed to improve our digital onboarding. What we had in the past was really a consumer experience band-aided over for our SMBs, particularly after the PPP, you know, the three letters that still give me PTSD, but we, we really wanted to advocate for our businesses because they need and deserve a different experience. But it also is very challenging. So, I think as we looked at some of the, the largest challenges we face is in KYB, you know, we’re dealing with, even if you have a fantastic platform with APIs and integrations, something specific as working with government entities, maybe they don’t update your Department of Commerce on a daily basis and, and how do you work through those?
So, as she (Zarina Tsomaeva) mentioned, it can’t just be digital. You have to have really back-office and frontline, branch or member-facing or business- facing, that can be that connector. And when they run into an issue, there’s someone readily available that’s very familiar with the system. And we work to ensure it’s not a hurdle as we’re onboarding, and also still operate within the confines of third party platforms that you might not have any control over. So, I would say one of the biggest hurdles is KYB.
My follow-up to that, that we found through this new digital app, was the significant number of abandoned applications, that previously we didn’t even have the ability to see that they had started an application and then dropped out. With this new platform we’ve engaged. I relate it to, I’m not a fisherperson, fisherwoman, fisherman, but if you think about a Fish Finder and having that ability to see what’s underneath the surface, it was just incredible to me how many were starting.
And now we have the capability to find where they’re having struggles, where they’re dropping out. We make improvements to our system. And we also engage a team to call and connect and say we notice you started an application with America First. How can we help you finish? So those are some of the challenges that you face. But, if I had to place #1 it’s that pesky KYB.
Paul: Around ID verification and what tools can Banks use to help with the digital onboarding to keep that friction to the minimum.
Kimberli: Certainly, I think that, as financial institutions, we have to get comfortable to trust the new technology that’s out there. We have been in banking at my credit union for the better part of 85 years. I feel like I’m confident in saying we are good at financial services. When it comes to digital onboarding tools, and verifications, and AI, and all those things, we are not the experts at that.
So, it’s about finding the right partner.
One of the things that worked really well for us, just speaking to some of the tools, is we, we spent a lot of time looking for who is that right partner and what does that platform look like. And those pieces were a big part of that. And my own experience, one of the reasons why I feel like our new launch has gone so successfully because it was more than just a platform. It was the individuals behind the company in the fintech it, they weren’t just fintech. She (Zarina Tsomaeva) put together a real A-team with individuals that came from AML backgrounds, financial services backgrounds.
So, in our very first meeting, I didn’t have to spend time describing why regulatory compliance is so important and why that needs to be a part of the process. She already had a team that knew that and helped me challenge the status quo at my credit union about “why are you doing it this way?”, “why are you relying on paper or manual verifications?”. And it was really eye-opening and refreshing to bring that outside perspective and to build a platform that met both of our needs and including, you know, 30 plus manual checks that we have to do prior to this on every business, including KYC and KYB, utilizing their capabilities in verification, IDs, not only taking a selfie, but having the technology to detect someone blinking, to make sure it’s an actual selfie and not a fraudulent one.
And so, it’s really getting outside of our comfort zone and having faith and trust in a team that has put it together. Touching on paperless, you know, it’s not always everyone paperless. As she mentioned, you have to meet your clients where they’re at. But in our case, specifically, it was adoption, getting comfortable with We can have successful paperless tools and digital signing and those things in the toolbox for us to be successful, but it can’t just be the Business Services team that has buy-in into that.
It has to be all 3000 Branch employees that also are behind that. It’s bringing our member along the way and having an intuitive enough experience that walks them through uploading their documents, and digital signing, and doing that from start to finish. And then still having the frontline experience for those businesses, because we have businesses that want to go in a building and sit down with somebody, and walk me through this. So that’s what stuck out to me, as far as the tools. And one more piece that she brought up about walking the business through additional products and services: RDC, ACH, Merchant Services. We knew that going in.
That was a big piece of the personal experience at America First Credit Union and we didn’t want to lose that with a digital experience. So, we’ve built in, before you get done and you sign digitally to open your account to the coolest credit union in my humble opinion. I’m going to ask you, before we get there, what additional products and services are you looking for, for your business? And when they hit “submit”, that stands out to those specific individual teams, who now have an automated referral and don’t always have to rely on frontline sales techniques to talk about the products and services we have, to help your business be successful.
Paul: So, really, you’re needing to educate both your internal and external teams because you’ve got legacy that you’re trying to change and shift.
Kimberli: Come through that. So, we’ve spent the better part of probably 2 years really looking at all the available onboarding platforms. And, what we had to decide at America First was, a lot of them that exist are a dressed up front-end user experience. But the back-end didn’t have the automations in place that I needed to scale growth at my financial institution. I cannot triple my staff if I want to triple my business member account. And so, we, we took some of those factors in to play. Obviously. as she mentioned, you want to look at your budget and, and not every financial institution is created equal.
But I think what was the game changer for America First as we went through this, our, our vendor that we worked with, Loquat, Zarina came in and she had a lending product, a lending platform. But we started to look at what they were doing for KYC and KYB and I put myself ahead of the lending team, bless their hearts, but said: lending is really cool, but I need you to build me an onboarding platform and take what you’ve already done for the lending side and really working with them and having a vision to help solve that need.
Because it was the 1st that I have seen where it did any kind of automation on the back-end and being able to see those checks and balances in the beginning. Also, what put it to my decision making or our teams’, you know not in a silo, we have, we have a lot of departments at America First Credit Union. We’re a large organization. We’re over 20 billion in assets, 130 branches, 3350 employees. We have our own home-grown Core. So, we have a lot of in-house. Well, they have been building an in-house consumer application, and they were on year three and it wasn’t launched yet. And you know, I work for a credit union, but I’m a sales girl. I’m not a numbers girl. But I knew I didn’t want to wait another three years or wait behind consumer.
I wanted to advocate for why businesses needed a different onboarding experience. And that was my pitch to our Board of Directors to say, don’t make us wait another three to four years to begin this and let’s not recreate the wheel, because we have this incredible fintech who solved it. They bring A game industry experience and it really just, you know, all came together, all the pieces and it was a no-brainer by the time we were done through all of our discovery, everything else that this was the way to go for America First.
Paul: And how do you get your teams to be comfortable using third parties? When they’re used to in-house is I think is one of the key elements of the switch.
Kimberli: It is a big challenge. There were a lot of internal discussions about putting all of our eggs in a fintech basket when we had always built our own. But I had this wonderful use case, years of experience where it had taken years, and a lot of money, and it likely wasn’t going to have any additional expense to use an outside fintech versus our in-house resources and staffing and salaries to get it done. And they can continue working on their consumer platform. And then I was going to win the race on business.
