Your strategic starting point for a digital banking evaluation

Before you evaluate a vendor, evaluate your institution

Before you start researching vendors, send out an RFP or sit through any demos, take a breath. Ask yourself:

Are we actually ready to evaluate a new digital banking platform provider?

Choosing a new digital banking platform isn’t just about picking software. It’s a major shift for your team, your operations, and your users. And yet, many financial institutions jump right into vendor conversations before they’ve had a real conversation with their own team. Your first step of a digital banking evaluation should start inside your walls, with your team, your data, and your goals.

The institutions that succeeded in digital banking conversions (making a ‘switch’) aligned their team with strategic discovery and shared clarity on their goals. When done well, this internal evaluation will give you the structure, confidence, and team alignment needed to lead a smarter digital banking evaluation from day one.

Why this stage is essential (and often skipped)

Our research revealed a critical insight:
Those who stopped tended to burn out at the planning & preparation stage of the process.

Too often, financial institutions jump into vendor engagement without taking the time to align internally – to clarify needs, priorities, or pain points. They run demos before identifying what problems they’re actually trying to solve. The result? Misalignment, delay, and lost momentum.

The days of single-department decision-making for digital banking platforms are over. The most successful conversions are those who brought in a diverse set of stakeholders early on and tackled it together.

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.

What “readiness” really looks like

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:

• Where are we today — and what’s not working?
• Why are we thinking about switching digital banking platforms now?
• What goals are we trying to hit, and how will we measure them?

This step lays the groundwork for everything that comes next — including which vendors actually make sense to talk to.

Your role as the facilitator

If you’re the evaluation’s lead, you’re not just managing a project — you’re shaping the success of one of the most strategic platform decisions your institution will make this decade.

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.

These tools are designed to help you:

• Identify which departments and voices must be at the table early
• Run a structured internal discovery session with clear questions and outcomes
• Ensure alignment between strategic goals and platform requirements
• Avoid misalignment, duplicated efforts, and late-stage friction

You are the lead strategist.
This step isn’t overhead — it’s forward momentum. These tools give you the language, structure, and support to lead with confidence.

What successful institutions do differently

Our research shows that institutions who complete successful evaluations and transitions:

• Start with a strategic needs assessment
• Bring IT, Operations, Digital, and Compliance into the conversation early
• Focus on user experience and internal efficiency
• Define platform success based on their needs, not just vendor features

Don’t start without these two tools

To guide your team through this critical stage, we’ve created two ready-to-use resources designed specifically for internal planning and alignment.

Digital Banking Conversion Needs Assessment

This guide helps you capture your institution’s goals, pain points, and priorities — before you ever talk to a vendor.

• Top 3-5 business objectives for a new digital banking platform for your financial institution
• Success metrics and KPIs to guide your whole evaluation
• A list of key friction points and gaps with your current platform
• Readiness to conduct a full platform evaluation — and what’s at risk if you wait
• Platform scope and compliance requirements

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

Workshop: Digital Banking Evaluation Kickoff

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:

• A plug-and-play workshop agenda
• Department-specific discovery questions to guide the right conversations
• Stakeholder team charts for Retail and Business Banking platform priorities
• Role assignment templates and timeline planning

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

Set the tone for the journey ahead

The institutions that switch successfully don’t just evaluate vendors. They evaluate themselves first — and get aligned before they get overwhelmed.

They lead with:

• Clarity over chaos
• Purpose over pressure
• Structure over guesswork

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.

Ready to lead with confidence?

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.