Arvest Bank rolls out equipment lending product

Arvest Bank launched an equipment finance lending product on cloud-native core banking platform Thought Machine.

The $26 billion bank decided to run the product on a cloud-based core to keep up with ever-changing segments — including the $1 trillion-and-growing equipment finance market, Laura Merling, chief transformation and operations officer at Arvest, told Bank Automation News, a sister publication to Equipment Finance News, adding that Thought Machine’s platform allows for a faster launch for new products.

“What we’re trying to do is provide what we’ll call highly personalized, targeted, specific customer segments, the products that they need, but also provide it to them at a faster rate as the market continues to change,” she said. “We started with equipment finance, and we are now continuing to add support for additional commercial loan types, and eventually all of them will be on that new banking core.”

The new lending product was in the works for nine months, including building the pieces, putting them on the core, standing up new product types, integrating payments and designing servicing, Merling said. “It gives you flexibility, it gives you scale, but it also allows you to do it with speed.”

“One Arvest Effort” a cloud journey

The bank’s entire team had a hand in building the product, including Chief Technology Officer Ninish Ukkan, the bank’s IT, data engineering, finance, risk and compliance and equipment finance teams, Merling said.

“It was what we call a ‘One Arvest Effort,’” she said.

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The product launch on the cloud-based platform is part of Arvest’s ongoing cloud journey and follows the bank’s 2022 announcement of a five-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud.

“[T]he faster that we can help [Arvest] get out of the traditional architecture and into a modern cloud platform, the faster you can get the data and analysis you want to do the change and improve the customer experience,” Janet Kennedy, North America vice president at Google Cloud, previously told BAN.

In fact, the Thought Machine cloud core is running on Google Cloud and the data collected through the platform is going into the bank’s new data platform — which also sits within Google Cloud, Merling said.

This story first appeared on Bank Automation News, a publication of Royal Media.