I had an opportunity to visit with Ted Brown, co-founder and CEO of Digital Onboarding, Inc. I am presenting some of our dialogue here:.What obstacles do community banks face when it comes to gaining new customers online?Ted Brown: The industry likes to frame this as a technology gap. That framing misses what is actually happening. The banks I talk to are not short on ambition or even on tools. They are buried under the ones they already own.The first obstacle is that the data will not come out clean. Most of what a bank needs lives inside its core, but cores were built to move money, not to hand a marketing team a usable picture of an account holder. One bank walked us through a list that took more than 40 conditions just to strip out warning codes before the real targeting could start.The second obstacle compounds the first. Banks have assembled a tool for content, a tool for segmentation, a tool for reporting, and a warehouse underneath to hold what the others cannot, and none of it talks to each other.The third obstacle is that most community bank marketing departments are one or two people, and you cannot out-execute a national bank’s growth machine when your entire digital engagement function fits in a single office. What is the best use of bank resources to turn this around?TB: Most banks are already spending enough. The issue is that they may be spending it on the wrong solution. Every new tool promises to close a gap and instead opens two more, because now it must be integrated, maintained and reconciled against everything already in the stack.Consolidation is the key, pulling the data and the engagement work onto one platform so a small team is not spending its time moving files between systems. Sequence matters as well. Banks frequently move to improve online account opening before addressing onboarding and activation, which is the wrong order. When activation is weak, additional new accounts simply produce more accounts that never become active. Activation should be strengthened first. And an outside partner is worth engaging only when it brings people who understand financial services data, not software alone.If I am a community banker who wants to stay competitive without selling to a larger bank, what are the most basic tools I can employ to make my digital onboarding competitive?TB: Entry level has far less to do with the size of the technology budget than most bankers assume, which is encouraging for a community institution. It has to do with where the bank places the finish line. Too many treat a funded account as the objective. In practice, opening the account is the straightforward part, and the relationship either develops in the weeks that follow or it does not develop at all.The starting point is a deliberate focus on the few actions that establish a real relationship: Funding the account, setting up direct deposit, enrolling in digital banking, and activating a card. An account that never completes those steps is a cost the institution carrieswithout return. The capability worth prioritizing is the one that does more than instruct. Directing a customer to open digital banking, locate the correct screen, and accept the terms will lose most of them. Providing a link that completes the task in a few clicks will not. Do that well across two or three high-value actions, measure the results, and a community bank is already ahead of most institutions its size.How does a bank maintain personal service while switching to digital tools? How do they reconcile the two?TB: I would push back on the premise, because it assumes the two are in tension, and the best community banks are proving they are not. Automation and the human relationship are not competing for the same ground. They are dividing the labor.The community bank advantage was never the branch itself. It was showing up at the moment that mattered. Used well, digital tools let a bank do that more often, for more people, without surrendering the reason those people chose it.Crystal ball: What do the next five years look like for digital onboarding, at community banks and banks of all sizes?TB: The headline everyone expects is AI, and AI will matter, but I think it is the second-order shift that reshapes the industry. The priority is shifting from acquisition to deepening. The piece that is genuinely not on the radar yet is measurement, and it is the one I would tell any banker to get ahead of now. Marketing is the first budget cut at most banks, and it earns that fate by reporting opens and clicks that no board has ever cared about. The institutions that break the cycle will connect their engagement work to the numbers leadership actually runs on, like accounts funded, enrollments completed, balances moved and revenue produced. The tooling to prove that in near real time is arriving fast. The banks that adopt the discipline early will stop defending their budget every year and start setting the agenda for everyone else.
