Benchmark Community Bank

Benchmark Community Bank, with assets totaling $1.3 billion, has been a cornerstone in Southside Virginia and northern North Carolina since 1971. Committed to helping local citizens and businesses thrive, Benchmark operates on an FIS Horizon core, delivering exceptional banking services and fostering community growth.

The First Priority

When Beth Beale joined Benchmark Community Bank as Chief Financial Officer in September 2023, her first priority was clear: improve access to, and accuracy of, the bank’s data.

Benchmark faced the same challenge as most other community banks — teams spent more time building spreadsheets to help inform decision making than making the actual decisions. The burden of pulling fragmented reports from disconnected systems fell hardest on those responsible for execution: finance, compliance, operations, and lending. And, compounding the issue, while management could act quickly, clear visibility of outcome from those actions often lagged.

So, within her first week, Beth signed Benchmark’s contract to partner with KlariVis.

This wasn’t a leap of faith — it was a calculated, confident decision, and one she was fully committed to execute on. The platform was designed by former bankers who had lived the pain of manual reporting plagued with constant back and forth communications, misaligned figures, and restricted access… bankers who knew there was a better way to operate. Beth had watched KlariVis evolve alongside the challenges community banks face daily, and its promise stuck with her. “When I first saw KlariVis, it was like they had been reading my mind. Everything I needed to see — deposits, loans, trends — was right there, already built,” she recalled.

For Beth and her team, signing was the first strategic step toward becoming a more efficient, data-driven institution. And as expected, KlariVis immediately rebalanced the data scales at Benchmark Bank: on-demand insights meant the team could spend less time compiling and analyzing, and more time strategizing and executing.

Implementation

From contract to go-live, KlariVis moved fast. The agreement was signed in September, implementation began in October, and by January, the platform was fully rolled out and in daily use across the bank.

Beth didn’t need a 30+ year understanding of the bank’s data to lead the implementation for Benchmark. The KlariVis team was hands-on, precise, thorough, and responsive. “I never had to flag anyone down,” she said. “They delivered exactly what they said they would. Once the data started flowing, our bankers could start validating right away.”

The platform began proving its value during that validation phase. Leadership teams were able to pull insights and answer questions they previously had to wait weeks for. The speed and clarity of KlariVis not only saved time, but it also built trust in the data early on, even before the full internal launch.

And then came the second test: a core conversion in February of 2025.

In most banks, this kind of transition disrupts reporting for months (sometimes even longer). But implementing KlariVis before the conversion meant that the bank’s reporting consistency wasn’t strictly dependent on what was locked up in its changing core, allowing the Benchmark team to continue to access and analyze its data throughout the majority of the conversion process.

The platform held the historicals needed to quickly validate Benchmark’s data again once the conversion was complete. As part of this process, new extracts to Benchmark’s core needed to be written. Beth, tasked with leading the project for a second time, mentioned on a call with the KlariVis team that this task was on her to-do list. The response?

“They asked if I had my credentials right there on the phone with me and said, ‘Give us ten minutes,” and walked me through the exact steps to build the extracts right then and there,” Beth said. Sixteen extracts were built in less time than it takes to order lunch.

Given the hours her team had spent creating other key extracts, they were stunned when she asked for the newly built extracts to be scheduled for daily delivery.

For Benchmark’s leadership team, the true value within this expedited process was continuity: audit-ready records, consistent trend lines, and near-constant visibility into what their customers were doing. And for the short time the KlariVis platform was unavailable to the Benchmark team during the conversion, Beth fielded daily calls from all levels of the bank: “When is KlariVis going to be back online?” That sort of impact, she said, doesn’t happen with just any vendor.

Organizational Change

KlariVis not only changed the way Benchmark reported, it changed how the entire organization operated.

Shortly after the second implementation, Benchmark’s top-producing commercial lender sent Beth a message: “This is the best tool the bank has implemented since I’ve been here.” He continues to log in every morning to check on his portfolio performance, deposits, and movement trends without needing help from finance or IT.

That kind of buy-in from commercial banking isn’t typical — and it’s not accidental. KlariVis is designed for intuitive, bank-wide access. Whether it’s the CFO preparing for a board meeting or a relationship banker pulling up a client’s loan and deposit history, KlariVis provides the same source of truth across the institution.

The result is true self-service. Teams throughout the bank can answer their own questions in real-time, reducing internal friction and unlocking capacity. And when bank employees have access to the data that helps them understand their individual performance and how it connects to the bank’s broader goals? It changes how they work by — more importantly — changing how they think.

Perhaps most valuable for Beth and the Benchmark team is that they can now see their deposit story clearly for the very first time. “We’ve always known what our loans were doing,” Beth explained. “But deposits? That was always murky. KlariVis gave us clarity — daily changes, balance movement, product-level trends. That was nonexistent before KlariVis. It is, in every sense of the word, a game changer.”

Strategic Impact

The ripple effects of that visibility have been institution-wide.

Leadership now builds strategy on previous-day data — not last quarter’s reports. After her first quarter-end, KlariVis allowed Beth to eliminate ten manually built, custom reports from her team’s workload. Duplicate reports across departments have become a thing of the past: “Now, there’s one data source and everybody goes by it.” Bankers across branches use the platform to tailor conversations with customers, identifying opportunities that would have previously gone unseen.

Beth didn’t just gain another software tool when she made the decision to partner with KlariVis — she concurrently gained a leg up on success in her role, and success for her institution. In a matter of weeks, KlariVis gave her the oversight, trust, and time to do what CFOs are meant to do: lead her bank into the future. And with a data-driven team beside her, that future shines bright.