Buy the Platform. Build the Discipline.

A few months ago, I was able to sit with a group of bankers from institutions ranging from $300 million to $3 billion in assets for a candid conversation about data strategy and technology. All of the bankers came from different markets, different core systems, different org charts, you name it. But when the discussion opened up, the themes converged quickly.

“We have all this data, but we can’t actually use it.”

“We bought a tool. Nobody really uses it.”

“We keep adding systems, but nothing talks to anything else.”

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with being data rich and intelligence poor. The investments have been made, the contracts signed, and yet, on a random Tuesday morning when the CEO asks a straightforward question about loan portfolio trends, someone is still exporting to Excel, doing research, and jumping through hoops for an answer.

This is not a technology problem. It is a discipline problem. And the distinction matters enormously.

The build vs. buy debate is asking the wrong question

Community banks have long wrestled with whether to build internal analytics capabilities or purchase a third-party solution. We know and have been part of these conversations for years. The bankers in this group had largely moved past this binary. A hybrid approach — buy the capability, configure it thoughtfully, and build small complementary pieces internally — was the more common approach.

Pure build is too costly. It is dependent on talent. Talent that, frankly, is difficult to recruit and retain, particularly in smaller and rural markets, adding risk to the equation to retain them. Plus, its takes too long to show results. Conversely, pure buy, without internal ownership, becomes shelfware within months.

The more pressing question is actually not build or buy. It is: what is your institution actually committing to once the contract is signed?

Banks are purchasing platforms with a multitude of features and using just a few of them. Not because the technology failed — but because the operational discipline required to fully adopt it was never established alongside it.

People remain the most significant implementation variable

Technology does not stall in the server room. It stalls in the organizational gaps — in the absence of clear data ownership, in inadequate onboarding, in the departure of the one employee who understood how the system actually functioned.

Talent shortages are real. Turnover risk is real. Cultural resistance to standardized processes — the gravitational pull of “we’ve always done it this way” — may be the most persistent barrier of all.

What emerged consistently from our conversations was not simply frustration with vendors, though that frustration was well-documented and largely warranted. It was the recognition that most institutions have more analytical capability than they are actively using — and an honest uncertainty about how to close that gap.

Naming that clearly is the first step toward addressing it.

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What the more successful institutions are doing differently

The banks making meaningful progress shared several common practices — and notably, none of them were about finding a better platform.

• Establish the Rule of Two. For every system a bank relies on, two people should understand it deeply — one primary champion, one backup. When institutional knowledge lives in a single individual, it leaves when they do. Two is not redundancy; it is risk management.
• Change the process before changing the system. The instinct to customize technology around existing workflows is almost always the costlier path. Heavy customization creates technical debt, extends implementation timelines, and frequently becomes obsolete before it is even deployed. The more durable approach is adapting internal processes first. Reserve customization for what directly impacts the customer experience.
• Require business lines to define the “why” upfront. IT’s role is to enable and integrate. Business users must define what success looks like — what data they need, what decisions they are trying to support, and how insights will be operationalized. Without that clarity at the outset, even a well-designed platform underperforms.
• Invest in peer champions, not just executive sponsors. Mandates from leadership generate compliance. Peer influence generates adoption. When a lender sees a colleague using data to make faster, more confident decisions, it creates the kind of cultural momentum that no top-down directive can replicate.

Vendor skepticism is warranted, but should be formalized

The focus group surfaced significant frustration with the gap between what vendors promise and what they deliver. Demos that do not reflect real-world functionality. Integrations that require far more configuration than disclosed. Features on a roadmap that never materialize.

Banks are responding by getting more rigorous — and that is the right instinct. Reference calls, integration testing requirements, proof-of-concept pilots, and post-implementation adoption check-ins should be standard practice in vendor evaluation, not exceptions.

The compounding value of discipline

The institutions seeing the greatest return on their technology investments are not necessarily running the most sophisticated platforms. They have built something harder to replicate: a governance structure with real accountability, a culture of data literacy, and internal clarity about what good data use looks like in practice.

A platform can be implemented in a quarter. The discipline to use it well takes longer — but it is the work that compounds over time, and it is what separates institutions that are genuinely data-driven from those that are simply data-loaded.

The gap between those two is worth closing.