BlueShore Financial

Driving multi-billion-dollar growth and preparing for Canada’s open banking future with personalized, data-driven services

Vancouver, Canada

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At a Glance

• Grew AUM 10 times since the start of the transformation journey

• Achieves a consistent 15- to 20-point lead over competitors in independent client surveys

• Increased share of wallet by 7 times

• Delivered seamless migration to latest version of Temenos Core Banking, enabling open-banking capabilities

• 91-92% positive customers experience with 88% recommendation score

With locations across the Greater Vancouver and Sea-to-Sky Regions of British Columbia, Canada, BlueShore Financial offers a full range of personal and business banking, wealth management, insurance and commercial products. BlueShore Financial helps clients achieve financial wellness® through personalized solutions and expert advice, delivered in a unique Financial Spa® branch environment. Founded in 1941, the organization strives to offer its clients the freedom to pursue their passions, save for retirement and leave legacies for loved ones.

Fred Cook, Chief Information Officer at BlueShore Financial, elaborates: “We operate under a credit union charter, but see ourselves as a financial boutique. To stand out in a crowded marketplace, we differentiate ourselves by providing expert advisory and wealth management services—and we are passionate about helping our clients achieve financial wellness in a digitally connected world.”

Differentiating on service quality

To foster lasting loyalty, BlueShore Financial takes a unique approach to customer service. Through its BlueShore Financial Spa branches across the province, the organization brings together customized solutions, expert advisors, and a dedication to long-term client relationships.

“We want to make the entire customer experience inviting and engaging from end to end,” Fred Cook continues. “In our Financial Spas, we’ve created a welcoming environment where clients can freely share their aspirations and build tailored plans to improve their financial prospects. Our aim is to understand each client’s individual needs and offer them tailored services in a consistent way across all our channels. To achieve this level of personal service at scale, we depend on our data.”

Preparing for a digital future

To help it deliver consistent, high-quality services, BlueShore Financial has relied for many years on Temenos banking solutions. The organization was the first in the country to implement Temenos Canada Model Bank functionality as part of Temenos Core Banking, and it also leverages Temenos Analytics to deliver deep insights into client preferences, service levels and more.

Our Temenos solutions allow us to deliver outstanding services to our clients—and we’re always looking for ways to enhance our approach. With the introduction of open banking on the horizon in Canada, we saw an opportunity to get on the front foot with regulatory compliance and bring the benefits of open finance to our clients.”
Fred Cook, Chief Information Officer at BlueShore Financial

Laying the foundations for open banking

To lay the foundation for open banking and long-term innovation, BlueShore Financial decided to move to the latest version of Temenos Core Banking. As well as helping to prepare for upcoming regulatory changes, moving to the new generation of the Temenos platform would allow the organization to further improve the integration between its digital channels and Financial Spas: enhancing 91- 92% positive client experience compared to the industry benchmark of 77% and achieving a recommendation score by 88% versus 68% in the industry.

Temenos Core Banking has been rock solid when it comes to reliability, with 99.9% uptime—so it was an easy decision to build on our success with the platform. At the same time as upgrading our Temenos Core Banking environment, we decided to take the opportunity to retool our entire digital landscape: deploying cutting-edge Temenos Digital Banking Platform to enable future open banking services online and on mobile.”
Fred Cook, Chief Information Officer at BlueShore Financial

Shaping higher-quality services

Working closely with Temenos and its technology partners, BlueShore Financial designed a new blueprint for its front-to-back services, underpinned by Temenos platform for digital and core banking—including the leading-edge mobile financial messaging tool Temenos digital banking Engage—and Temenos Data Lake.

To implement the Temenos digital platform, alongside Temenos services, BlueShore Financial worked with OneAston, Red Hat, and HPE. The organization uses Uniken’s software as the cybersecurity client gateway integrated to Temenos digital banking.

Fred Cook confirms: “We’re very excited about the new capabilities we’re rolling out. By allowing our clients to message our experts directly from their mobile devices via Temenos Digital Banking Platform, we’ll unlock another powerful way to deepen the relationship and foster loyalty. And with Temenos Data Lake, we’ll gain the ability to drill down into our data in real time—revealing valuable opportunities to improve our services by minimizing friction in key client journeys.”

Overcoming the challenges of the pandemic

Just as BlueShore Financial was preparing to go live with the new platform, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. By collaborating with Temenos, the organization overcame the challenges of local lockdowns and social distancing to deliver a seamless migration to the new integrated environment.

Fred Cook explains: “We had originally planned to switch over to the new Temenos platform during the Easter long weekend, but because of the pandemic we were forced to find a way to complete the work remotely and over the course of a regular two-day weekend. With support from Temenos, that’s exactly what we achieved. During the go-live, we didn’t receive a single customer service complaint, which is a testament to thorough planning and careful execution on the part of both Temenos and BlueShore Financial.”

Today, BlueShore Financial is using the latest generation of Temenos solutions to enable even higher-quality financial services for its clients. The organization backs up production data from its primary data center in Calgary, Alberta to a secondary site in Vancouver every 15 minutes, helping to minimize the risk of data loss, shrink recovery time and ensure resilient services for its clients.

Strengthening loyalty, boosting AUM

Through its partnership with Temenos, BlueShore Financial is laying the foundations for future-ready open banking services. At the same time, deeper cross-channel integration and customer insights allow the organization to extend the personal services of its Financial Spas onto digital channels—enhancing the experience and nurturing loyalty.

“With new capabilities such as direct messaging online and on mobile, we’re offering a much more unified and responsive service,” comments Fred Cook. “Behind the scenes, Temenos Analytics is helping us to get faster and more detailed answers to questions such as: ‘Which client segments are underserved?’, ‘Which products are most relevant for this client?’, and ‘Which clients are at highest risk of attrition?’.”

He continues: “If you don’t know what your clients want and how best to serve them, then you probably won’t be in business for very long in a competitive market like ours. Thanks in large part to our Temenos solutions, we’ve grown our assets under management from $600 million to $7 billion since we launched the Financial Spa concept. The vast majority of that growth has been the result of increasing our share-of-wallet from existing clients, which illustrates just how effective our focus on client loyalty has been.”

Standing out from the crowd

As BlueShore Financial continues its journey with Temenos, the organization is confident that it has the optimal combination of people, partnerships and technology to strengthen its hard-won client relationships. For example, BlueShore Financial uses the Temenos CEO Navigator to compare its performance with other banks and credit unions, helping to identify gaps and refine its services.

In addition to benchmarking from Temenos, we commission regular independent surveys of clients and non-clients to make sure we’re on the right track. When it comes to key factors for improving our client’s financial lifestyle, we are consistently 15 to 20 points ahead of our competitors—highlighting our commitment to delivering on our clients’ needs.”
Fred Cook, Chief Information Officer at BlueShore Financial

Enabling continuous innovation

Today, the organization continues to work with Temenos to augment its platform with innovative capabilities. For example, BlueShore Financial is exploring explainable AI, which will allow it to demonstrate the rationale behind AI-driven actions to its regulators. The organization is also assessing more capabilities of Temenos Digital Banking Platform, which will offer employees a 360-degree view of the client for more positive and productive support experiences.

“Our relationship with Temenos is truly a partnership, and our transformation journey has helped us sharpen our competitive edge,” concludes Fred Cook. “Temenos understands that one size does not fit all—and they offer us the same level of tailored service that we strive to provide to our own clients. Temenos has the technology and the partner ecosystem to empower organizations in competitive markets to differentiate themselves effectively, and we can’t recommend them highly enough.”