Before you research vendors or request demos, ask: Are we ready to evaluate? Choosing a platform isn’t just picking software—it’s a major shift for your team and operations. The best institutions start internally: aligning on goals, gathering data, and building structure. This step drives clarity, confidence, and a better evaluation.
Our research found that teams who stalled often skipped internal alignment. They engaged vendors before clarifying pain points, goals, or priorities—losing momentum fast.
The best-led evaluations brought in diverse voices early, grounded in shared needs, and used this stage to take control before vendors did.
This internal evaluation & alignment exists to ground your team in shared goals, identify friction points in your current digital experience, and align on key success metrics of a new platform. This is the stage where you take control of the evaluation — and prevent vendors from doing it for you.
Research insight: The most successful switchers include a needs & goals assessment in their top two initial steps before reaching out to new potential providers.
This early stage isn’t about gathering input for input’s sake. It’s about connecting the right people to the right problems — and identifying how a future digital banking platform can solve them.
That means answering:
This step lays the groundwork for everything that comes next — including which vendors actually make sense to talk to.
As the evaluation lead, you shape one of your institution’s most critical platform decisions. These tools help you: identify the right voices early, run structured discovery, align goals with requirements, and prevent missteps. This isn’t overhead—it’s momentum, with language and structure to lead confidently.
Research insight: Successful switching journeys usually involve Digital Experience and IT teams in the decision. When it comes to the execution, multiple departments usually work together to manage the project.
Our research shows that institutions who complete successful evaluations and transitions:
To guide your team through this critical stage, we’ve created two ready-to-use resources designed specifically for internal planning and alignment.
This guide helps you capture your institution’s goals, pain points, and priorities — before you ever talk to a vendor.
Use this resource with your team across Digital, IT, Operations, and beyond. It’s your starting point for building clarity — and momentum.
Download the Digital Banking Conversion Needs Assessment
This is your blueprint for running a strategic workshop that brings your team together and gets everyone aligned; use this guide to run a strategy session with your internal stakeholders, which includes:
Whether you’re leading this for the first time or you have years of vendor conversions under your belt, this will help you run a smart, focused kickoff session.
Download the Digital Banking Evaluation Kickoff Workshop
The institutions that switch successfully don’t just evaluate vendors. They evaluate themselves first — and get aligned before they get overwhelmed.
They lead with:
By investing in this early phase you’ll help prevent delays and confusion later, get vendor conversations aligned to what you need, strengthen your business case for your board, and be able to move faster along the evaluation process, with more buy-in and less friction.
Start with the tools that help you do just that.
Start where success starts: with internal discovery and team alignment. Download both tools and lay the foundation for a confident, coordinated digital banking platform evaluation.
