CHICAGO—For more than a year, financial institutions have beenurged to move from a multichannel environment to an omnichannelenvironment. Omnichannel refers to the creation of a consistentuser experience that extends to every channel through which acredit union operates.

At the same time, popular thinking still mandates that creditunions shop for best-of-breed solutions in each channel. Thus, thequestion has become: How can a credit union create a consistentuser experience using products that it has purchased from severaldifferent, unrelated vendors?

One company exhibiting at BAI Retail Delivery claims to havesolved this problem.

Originally a portal company, Backbase has leveraged its portaltechnology to create a digital retail banking platform calledBackbase Engage.

“We've taken that and wrapped it in a set of products andservices, built widgets on top of it, to really allow a financialinstitution to use it for everything they need out of the box for aretail banking experience,” Peter Chapman, Backbase's principlefintech strategist said. “This includes everything from themarketing website to the origination piece to online banking,mobile banking and tablet banking.”

The goal, he said, is to create a single, consistent memberjourney.

Not only is the user experience consistent, it can be entirelycustomized by the credit union. In other words, two credit unionscan both run Backbase Engage and each can deliver a truly uniqueexperience to its members.

“We built it so that business and marketing people cancompletely control the UX,” Chapman said.

Chapman admitted that Backbase cannot provide every digitalcomponent a credit union might need. The company has thereforepartnered with other software providers for feature sets likeremote deposit capture and bill pay.

Even so, the Backbase Engage design is able to maintain thatconsistent user experience.

“All of our partners are API driven,” Chapman said. “Eachpartner needs to be comfortable working behind the scenes. If acompany wants to control any of the UX, we won't partner withthem.” He added that every Backbase partner must also be a goodcultural fit.

“It's all about a credit union regaining control of its digitalstrategy and being able to differentiate itself,” Chapmanconcluded. “That's something we believe in passionately.”