Cloud without compromise: Lumin's enterprise-level service

Since 1945, Farmers and Merchants Bank has served the people of Arkansas from its headquarters in a beautiful old Queen Anne building nestled in Stuttgart, the rice and duck capital of the world. Over the 80 years it's been in business, F&M has built a reputation for innovation and a base of more than 20,000 loyal customers.

The bank has always stayed true to its founding values; it believes in making banking accessible and easy for the people of Arkansas. In the world of traditional finance, this can be difficult. But like the locals who use their services, F&M is committed to quality.

For several years now, the bank has been on a digital transformation journey. They began by moving to the cloud – the team is currently using Google Workspace – and they’re now amplifying what they can do with Workspace by integrating Lumin into their processes.

How does a large company like F&M undergo digital transformation without losing the reputation and values it has long established?

Google Workspace: the launch point

Necessity is the mother of invention, and during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic F&M found it necessary to move work online. It needed to collaborate with both customers and other banks, all of which were now strictly off-premises.

Transitioning its document work to Google Workspace was an obvious step, and a pivotal one.

Tyler Morgan, CIO at F&M, says embracing cloud technology has undoubtedly had a positive impact on the business. “We really liked the ability that cloud and software as a service (SaaS) gives us to scale,” he says. This move gave the bank freedom to scale while maintaining the efficiency and quality it’s renowned for.

“Embracing that technology really sort of moves the sticks, so to speak, in terms of the gain in efficiency we get from not having to support on-premise software.”

Finding Lumin

After discovering the joys of cloud-based software, F&M began to look for more opportunities. “We wanted to get away from a lot of the Windows desktops and sort of the heavy legacy software, client-based software that had to be installed,” says Morgan.

It needed a PDF editor that was adaptable to the browser environment. Morgan’s job was to find that product. “The market, quite frankly, was very sparse in the types of solutions that could do what we wanted to do.”

Ken Masters, IT Director for Digital Experience at F&M, agrees. “When we look at the PDF market that's out there today, one of the things that we quickly realised was our options were somewhat limited.”

F&M had specific requirements: the software needed to edit PDFs, have digital signatures, cost a reasonable amount and be easy to operate. They stumbled across Lumin, and found what Masters calls “a diamond under a rock”.

It fit their needs, and it was clear team Lumin would work hard to fit in any future needs the bank might have. “It's just such a smart product,” Morgan says. “It is much more lightweight, but brings all the same capability as your traditional PDF software.”

It was the licensing structure that won over Masters, who noted implementation was much quicker because of the unlimited users feature. “It changed the landscape of how the cost was being driven.”

Meeting security requirements

Security was paramount for F&M, given the sensitive nature of financial data. Moving the bank’s documents to Google Drive had been a mammoth enough task – moving them again was out of the question.

“One of the unique use cases for us is that Lumin supports Google integration,” says Morgan. “It means we can keep our documents in the Google Drive repositories, where they always live and where we like for them to live, because we've already built all the structure and controls that we want around that environment.”

“But we still have the ability to edit those documents with a PDF editor in the browser.” 

This gives F&M a lot of control – and with that control comes security assurance. “At the end of the day we know where everything is and that it's accounted for.”

Other security measures that stood out to Morgan included Lumin’s willingness to isolate logins to the bank’s Google domain, and to establish IP restrictions for the software; this allows the bank to restrict access to its premises.

“Being a financial institution, we worry about where our documents are,” he says. “Approaching it this way allows us to define where they can be accessed from.”

Keeping company values at the core

Collaboration is key

Will Tate, Reporting and Automation Analyst at F&M, is responsible for making the digital experience easy for staff. He says making collaboration easy is important for him and his staff, and Google Workspace was the key to kickstarting this. Lumin was the next step.

“One of our biggest goals with leveraging the Google suite is the collaboration,” he says. “Being able to edit documents and work on things in real time with different departments in the bank has served us pretty well.”

Customer experience

Morgan says he values the efficiency Lumin gives F&M’s staff and customers. “Efficiency and speed are very important to us, right? So every extra step that we have to do in a process adds time to – and decreases – the customer experience.” 

He says Lumin’s tight integration with Google means collaboration is faster and easier, leading to much faster internal processes. “We're able to get documents and forms to customers more quickly.”

Tate agrees that in banking, customer experience is inextricable from time. When we work with our customers, one thing we really hone in on is the customer experience and the time that's spent in preparation for them.”

He spends about an hour each day working within Lumin. He and his staff are laser-focused on efficiency, and doing customer paperwork – like loan applications – via cloud software has been a game changer.

“Now that the bank is leveraging Lumin, I can actually take a lunch,” he says.

Accessibility

F&M was previously using a different PDF editing software that was not cloud-based. This meant work moved slowly due to clunky processes: upload a PDF, figure out how to edit it, download and then reupload to Google Drive.

“I would spend a lot of time having to teach myself the different interlocking pieces of the software and understanding fully what it could do,” says Tate.

“And then, you know, we have around 300 other employees that we would have to then go out and make sure that they understood the software as well.”

Onboarding staff to Lumin has been much easier. “The time that it takes to onboard different employees to the software is next to nothing,” says Tate. “I mean, we just drop it on the computer and it syncs with the Google cloud.”

Digital transformation without compromise

For a large corporation – especially a bank – change can be difficult. It’s not just changing mindsets; it’s changing processes, meeting security requirements, measuring costs – the list goes on and on. 

That’s why F&M took its time choosing the right solution for its PDF editing. “And after that, we were off to the races,” says Morgan.

F&M’s culture is built around doing the right thing. Its internal set of values include the maxim “be a good human”. Morgan, Masters and Tate see digital transformation as a part of this culture. Cloud-based software like Lumin allows the bank’s staff to provide high quality, quick service to its loyal customers.

“Every day we're looking to treat people the same way that we would like to be treated. As a bank, that's how we like to approach our relationship with our customers.”

It’s how Lumin likes to operate, too.