Executive Summary
In the second episode of Next Best Action, CarrieAnne Cormier, founder of BankSmart Studio and former COO of IC Credit Union, joins us to unpack why community banks and credit unions get stuck mid-transformation, and why the holdup so rarely traces back to the technology itself.
CarrieAnne spent years running retail operations at Avidia Bank before taking the COO seat at IC Credit Union, and she saw the same failure pattern from both chairs. A transformation shows its cracks early, often in how leaders describe the project internally rather than in the technology itself. Call an upgrade “innovative” before it ships, and the letdown starts the moment employees compare notes with a customer. Skip past that stage, and the rest follows: staff who won’t recommend a product they’ve never opened themselves, departments that treat digital as someone else’s job, and momentum that quietly drains out of a project nobody meant to abandon.
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Key Takeaways
- Culture Decides Before Technology Does: When every decision, down to a $50 refund, has to run through executive leadership, the organization isn’t ready for a digital transformation. That pattern shows up long before the technology conversation even starts.
- Language Is the Early Warning Sign: Calling an upgrade “innovative” or promising it will make the institution “just like Chime” sets an expectation the platform usually can’t meet. Most digital banking platforms are close variations of the same handful of processors, and misaligned language between leadership and staff is often the first sign that a transformation is losing momentum.
- Digital Still Gets Treated Like a Side Project: At many institutions, digital ownership never left the department that ran it in 2007, deposit operations, because that’s who controlled the core system. Without a clear owner for digital strategy and experience, transformation stays a technical task instead of a customer-facing one.
- Cross-Functional Teams Beat Committees: A recurring working group that includes retail, marketing, training, and IT keeps every department aware of what’s coming and why. A ten-person decision committee slows things down. A working team that meets regularly moves them forward.
- Employees Have to Use What They Sell: Training materials and resource guides don’t change behavior if the people using them don’t bank with their own institution. When frontline staff haven’t used a feature themselves, they either avoid recommending it or actively discourage customers from trying it.
- Vendor Relationships Run on Honesty, Not Polish: The vendors worth keeping are the ones who disclose product gaps upfront and show up when something breaks, not the ones with the best demo. A vendor relationship that functions as a partnership is worth more than one that just performs well in the sales cycle.
- Follow the Trend, Not the Old Assumption: Marketing dollars still lean on channels that don’t match where people actually get financial information now. Paying attention to where customer and member attention has already moved matters more than defending a media plan built on outdated assumptions.
Full Episode Transcript
Alex Jiménez: Welcome to Next Best Action. My guest today is CarrieAnne Cormier, founder of Banksmart Studio. Formerly, she was the COO at IC Credit Union in Fitchburg, Mass., and an SVP of Retail Operations and Strategy at Avidia Bank in Hudson, Mass. If you don’t know CarrieAnne, or Bank Smart Carrie as we call her, you should check out her weekly show, The Carrie Show, on YouTube. Welcome, CarrieAnne. Before we get into our topic, which will be digital transformations, tell us about Banksmart Studio.
CarrieAnne Cormier: Awesome. Alex, thank you so much for having me. I started the idea of Banksmart Studio because I feel like we’re talking about the same things in banking. It’s the same trainings, the same stuff out there. As someone who has been in it at the executive level all the way to the teller line, I’ve seen so much and I want to talk about it. I think there are a lot of people that are still trying to figure it out along with me. So it’s really been a place to share ideas and conversations, and then we’re going to be branching into some more training and coaching.
But I’m really excited just to start getting the conversations out there, to talk about the things that we’re afraid to say around the boardroom table because we know we’re all thinking it.
Alex Jiménez: That’s great. I did watch your latest episode this morning and I had to have a chuckle over the Pope story, which is hilarious. Anyway, let’s get going on our topic, which is digital transformations and why they stall. I know that you have been involved in digital transformations within your organizations. You were running operations at Avidia at the same time I was running operations at Rockland Trust, and both of us were involved in digital transformation. We probably called it something different then. But when you moved to the COO seat at IC Credit Union, what did you see that made you think, we’re going to get in our way here before the technology even matters?
CarrieAnne Cormier: That’s a great question. I think that we always have our eye on the technology. We want the new shiny thing, but we don’t look around and see everything else around it. Are we ready for it? One thing that made me think, oh man, we are so not ready, is when you find out early on that everyone has to run every decision by executive leadership.
We can’t refund a customer $50. We can’t have a jeans day for the staff. What greeting card should we send out for employees on their anniversary? Should it have a birthday hat or should it have one of those noisemakers? That was a sign early on for me. And I joke, but this was very serious. The first week I’m there, the head of retail kept telling me she was going to the bathroom.
And I’m like, I don’t need to know that. And she’s like, oh, well, I just wanted to make sure you knew where I was, because if I’m not at my desk, I get in trouble. That was very much an indicator of what the culture was like, whether it was intended or not. A lot of times this kind of culture happens and it’s not necessarily the current leadership. It’s been ingrained for years, it’s hard to break, and then it continues to perpetuate.
For me, that was the thing. When you have to get executive leadership involved in every decision, or many of the decisions, you know that stuff gets in the way before you can even start to talk about technology.
Alex Jiménez: Yeah, and then when you’re trying to make a decision like we need to change our digital banking platform, which is a big decision, it takes a year and a half at best.
CarrieAnne Cormier: Absolutely. And let’s get everyone in and we’ll do the pros and cons list and make sure everyone weighs in and has their vote. And what happens when everyone picks one, but you know it’s not the best one? How do you backpedal that? So there’s definitely a lot of decision fatigue and analysis paralysis.
Alex Jiménez: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been there. I remember being part of an organization that acquired another organization, and the cultures were very different. The acquirer was very much led by one person and everyone followed what this person wanted to do. Top-down culture. And the other one was the let’s-hold-hands-and-all-agree culture. The clashes between those two cultures were amazing to see. Years later, we were still fighting the little tribes that were inside the bank.
CarrieAnne Cormier: Absolutely. And I’m very much hands off. Make sure you let me know that you’re not in a ditch somewhere so I don’t worry about you. But other than that, if you’re doing your job, I am not in your business. So to have someone say, hey, I’m doing this, I’m like, this feels strange. It’s definitely one of those things you’ve got to pick up on, because it tells you before it tells you, if that makes any sense.
Alex Jiménez: Yeah. As I managed a transformation, I was very much aware of the challenges in front of me and who I needed to get the buy-in from, and I continually sold the idea that we needed to transform, that we needed to upgrade, that we needed to look at things differently, et cetera.
Three, four years go by and I felt like I was always doing the same thing. Something I was never aware of was all the changes that I was able to get done. It wasn’t until I was gone from that organization that I realized I did a lot of stuff. The culture did change and a lot of things did get better. But when you’re in the trenches, it’s difficult to know where you are in that process. Do you have momentum? Is it going away? Did you experience that at Avidia or IC Credit Union?
CarrieAnne Cormier: Yeah. Having looked back on all the digital projects I’ve done, I always felt, like you said, so in the trenches. We’re not making enough headway. And then I look back at some of the stuff that we did at Avidia and I’m like, holy crap. How did we, one, get away with that? Two, pull it off in that timeframe? It was some sort of magical moment where everything came together.
But when you start to look at where things fall apart, there are some glaring ones out there. We know there start to be meetings on meetings, and you need a team sync for everything just to make sure we’re on the same page. You start to unpack implementations and find out maybe someone on the team misunderstood what was going to happen with a conversion or an upgrade, or maybe a vendor overpromised.
Then you need additional connectware or a plugin, and you start to lose some momentum there. But honestly, the secret is it happens very early on. The most subtle red flag that I found, that I didn’t notice until looking back, is misalignment on language internally.
What I mean by that is, I had just been through a big tech stack upgrade. We did core, digital, cards, payments, everything in between, all at the same time.
Alex Jiménez: Wow.
CarrieAnne Cormier: Not my idea, but we did it. And the language I heard early on was, we’re going to upgrade our mobile app. We’re going to be innovative now. We’re going to compete with fintechs and Chime. We’re going to be just like Chime. And I’m like, hold on.
When we’re out there purchasing, let’s just take digital, for example. Alkami, Q2, any of the core processor ones, FIS, Jack Henry, Fiserv. A lot of it, as you know, is the same platform color-coded with new wallpaper. So I tried to always be very mindful with my team about making sure the language was precise. Because when you start getting the idea in everyone’s head that this is going to be great, we’re going to be able to do all this stuff, and then you launch and you’re just the same as the bank or credit union down the street with different colors, there starts to be a letdown. Well, we were promised we could do this. I thought we were going to be innovative. How come we still have wood paneling on the walls and brocade drapes? You know what I’m talking about, right?
Alex Jiménez: Yes. Absolutely. I’ve been there.
CarrieAnne Cormier: So for me, it’s making sure you recognize early on that language matters, words matter. Curate internal communication and ensure the understanding is the same, so that from the CEO down to the mail courier, you’re all thinking the same way in the same language. And that’s hard. We know that’s hard. But it’s something to be mindful of, because that for me is where I see momentum start to slip.
Alex Jiménez: Yeah. When people ask me what breaks a transformation, to me it’s always leadership. The ones that I have seen work, the top leadership was behind them, particularly the CEO. The CEO doesn’t have to be involved in everything, does not have to make all the decisions, but they are behind the idea of the change. When the CEO says, hey, CIO, COO, or worse yet, Mr. Project Manager, you are in charge of this transformation, then you know you’re in trouble.
I had a situation where the head of a business unit delegated a major transformational change to someone. And later on, he was complaining that nothing ever got done. It’s like, but you did not come to the meetings. You did not answer questions. You were not involved. That’s why. And he was like, but I gave them all the power. Well, they didn’t even know they had the power. It’s amazing how sometimes we can’t get out of our own way as leaders.
CarrieAnne Cormier: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Alex Jiménez: At the end of the day, we’re not necessarily talking about a technology problem. We’re talking about culture and leadership. Have you had situations where people got stuck on the idea that this is a technology problem, when it’s really something very different?
CarrieAnne Cormier: Only every single day. If I could summarize my experience with digital down to one statement, it would be that. What I find, and this is a broad statement based on my experience, is that digital is still being treated like a side project at most organizations.
In 2007, when we were standing up mobile banking, who was in charge of it? Deposit Ops. Because they were in charge of the core banking function and changing the codes and all of that. So for some reason, at a lot of organizations, they’re still in charge of digital. And we haven’t come up with that separation of what’s digital strategy and digital experience versus digital administration.
So you have a group of people that are great testers. They will check every single box. Three times. But they are not thinking of the customer or member experience. They’re not thinking of how we’re going to train it and talk about it internally. They’re just like, oh, well, I asked the vendor if they had a training guide. Yes, I’m sure you did, because that was on the project plan. You did a great job.
That’s been the hardest part for me to break. My team at Avidia, and talking about looking back and actually seeing progress, we had built a team we called Tech Table. Every other week there were probably eight of us that met, from retail, marketing, training, IT, digital operations. We would just sit at a table and go, okay, what’s new? We would talk about, okay, we’re doing this upgrade. And now marketing would know, okay, we’ve got to start thinking about that. Training would know, okay, how am I going to communicate that internally? Sometimes people don’t realize what they’re doing touches digital, or how it could be framed that way. So it was a really great way for us to talk about it.
It wasn’t a decision committee. Those are bad too, when you need the ten-person decision committee. It was really a cross-functional team. That worked so well, because when you have it just sit in operations, there’s no thought or accountability for customer and member experience, internal awareness, marketing, training. They say, okay, we’re done. Here you go. Market it. You know that never works. It also increases the go-to-market time. Okay, well, I’ve already had my calendar planned for the year, and now I need another six to eight weeks to do creative and ideas and all that. It doesn’t work that way. And so many organizations are still doing it.
Alex Jiménez: Yeah, absolutely. And they approach branches differently, because the feeling is that’s where our customers or members are, at the branch. Well, no, they’re not. The majority of them never walk into a branch. That’s no longer the case.
In the past few years, I’ve worked with a lot of the regional banks, and there it is different. The digital team has become part of their product management organization. There are different challenges there, because they believe digital is a product, and not necessarily a channel, and not necessarily something where you work on the experience. So there’s a different set of issues if it’s defined as a product.
But looking back, having been at a small community bank, I was the head of operations. I was also the head of product. Nobody ever said, hey, Alex, you own the debit card product. But I did. I owned it. I would have meetings with MasterCard, I believe was our vendor, to talk about what we were going to do for marketing and so on. So you have an operations person talking to MasterCard, and the marketing team is not even involved in the discussion. It is very bizarre. We have not adjusted our organizations to meet the requirements and needs of the digital world.
CarrieAnne Cormier: I agree. And when I sit around tables, the pendulum starts to swing all the way the other way. It’s like, well, this falls under marketing. You’ve got to be very careful about that too, because I love my marketing friends, but they are not all box checkers. You need that balance.
Alex Jiménez: Yeah. When you and I met many, many years ago, we were both part of the social media teams at our banks. Both of us were back office people. I remember talking to our marketing team and they were like, no, you do social media. We don’t do social media. And to me, I was like, what? But you’re marketing. They’re like, no, we don’t know anything about that. You know about the tech stuff. You do social media. You’re digital. Which was very strange.
You guys at Avidia did an amazing job, which is how you and I connected in the social media world. But there was a lot of that weird consternation of what’s marketing, and where do they fit, and how do they fit within this whole digital world. When I owned digital, I owned the website, I owned the social media, I owned a whole bunch of things that should have never been owned by someone in operations.
CarrieAnne Cormier: Well, you’ll be glad to know that’s still alive and well today in the cultures of banks and credit unions.
Alex Jiménez: Oh, yes. I see that every day. The other piece I wanted to ask you about: having just worked with a fintech that was pitching to banks, the community institutions, both community banks and credit unions, are constantly being pitched by all kinds of different vendors. It’s such a challenge, I believe, to be on that side and having to figure out which of these vendors are the real thing, what they bring, and how they fit into what we want to do as far as transformation. What counsel would you give to folks out there who are challenged with that situation right now?
CarrieAnne Cormier: Yeah, this one is hard to pinpoint, because my approach with vendors is just be real with me. Some of that is based on my personality. Just tell it to me straight. I can sniff out when someone feels like they’re overpromising.
Some of my best vendors haven’t always been the ones whose product performs the best. But they’ll tell me what the deficits are. They’ll tell me what to be mindful of. And they will marshal every resource they have to support me when I need it. For me, knowing that I could call someone and say, hey, we’re running into this, and they’re like, okay, I’m getting ahead of this, and they’re on the meeting. Or I’ve worked with some that have helped put me in the spotlight as a younger executive: hey, can we get you out at different conferences or different events? That has meant so much to me in being a good partner. That’s not necessarily how you base your vendor decisions, but when you put the whole picture together of, is this just a transaction, or does this feel like an actual relationship or partnership? I think that’s what’s different. I’m willing to be more lenient on the technology if I know we can get to the end result together.
Alex Jiménez: Yeah, absolutely. We just touched on culture, and that gets blamed for a lot of things, and I am guilty of doing that. In fact, I did it just a few minutes ago. But what does a culture that actually supports transformation look like, particularly from being in operations and driving the day-to-day transformation?
CarrieAnne Cormier: This is one of my favorite topics, because for me, culture is a vibe, right? It’s the unwritten rules that are so ingrained into what you do that it just happens. You don’t need a manual for it. You don’t need a playbook. It’s just how we show up every day. I’ve always talked with teams about how we need to build a culture of digital. Strategy isn’t just having a strategy person. Digital isn’t just having a digital person. It’s not a committee. Like I said earlier, it’s a team.
And team members need to use the products. It starts there. You don’t go working at Ann Taylor and wear Old Navy. You actually have to use the app. Because so many people in an organization don’t use their own technology. And for me, that is the most frustrating thing.
I’ll give you an example. I walk into a branch one day as head of retail. I always did branch visits, talked to people. You hear a lot of good stuff on the way. Customer conversations. So I hear one where the head teller is talking to a customer about P2P. And they’re like, yeah, I don’t use that either. It’s scary.
Alex Jiménez: And you just rolled out Zelle.
CarrieAnne Cormier: Right. And I’m just, no, no, no, no, no. You realize in those moments that no matter how many resource guides you put in front of them, or training materials, or little webinars you make them watch, it is not filtering down.
So, things like that. Training and workshops need to be inclusive. I’ve had similar things, and you can appreciate this. Commercial lenders, mortgage originators: yeah, I think we have an app for that. You don’t have a culture of digital or a culture of transformation if everyone doesn’t buy in and understand it.
Alex Jiménez: I have a quick story. I was the head of digital, and I got a phone call from one of our board members. The question was, when are we going to roll out mobile deposit? This was a year and a half after we rolled it out. So I told him, and he’s like, oh, I didn’t know that. I said, well, do you have the app? He’s like, no. Do you want to use the app? Let me walk you through it.
So here I am, an executive of the bank, helping a board member on the phone to download the app, then get into the app, then, without seeing what he’s doing, telling him how to do everything. But his grandson said that he should have mobile deposit, and he wasn’t sure we had it. Amazing.
CarrieAnne Cormier: It takes a village, that’s for sure.
Alex Jiménez: It sure does. It absolutely does. So, CarrieAnne, before we leave, I want to do a lightning round. I’m going to give you a question, and I want you to give me a quick answer with whatever comes to mind. Don’t spend a ton of time thinking about these. What’s one book every banking leader should read?
CarrieAnne Cormier: Hold on, I’m going to get it wrong. So let me just make sure I get the name of the book right. It’s Chris Voss. He’s a former FBI negotiator. It’s called Never Split the Difference. I have it on audiobook, so I listen to it when I’m driving. Sometimes I’ll listen to it again and again. It’s really good.
Alex Jiménez: I’m not familiar with this book, so now I know what to read. Okay. Coffee or tea?
CarrieAnne Cormier: Neither.
Alex Jiménez: Ah, I knew you were going to say that.
CarrieAnne Cormier: I’m not a caffeine person, so I don’t do either. What do I drink? I’m trying out the sparkling water, the seltzers. I’m dabbling in that now because I heard it makes you smart and hip.
Alex Jiménez: Okay. What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?
CarrieAnne Cormier: Well, I have four-year-old twins, and they creep into the bed somehow at two in the morning. So I have one on each side. The first thing I do is roll them out.
Alex Jiménez: That’s good. All right. What’s one piece of advice you wish you’d gotten earlier in your career?
CarrieAnne Cormier: Keep doing it. What I mean by that is, so many people will downplay the skills that you have. Even talking about me doing my YouTube show, that’s something I would have done ten years ago if someone had said, hey, you’re good at that, just keep doing it.
Alex Jiménez: That’s great. What’s your number one leadership mantra, if you have one?
CarrieAnne Cormier: I’m not going to say this right, but it’s surround yourself with really good people and get out of the way. That has been my biggest success.
Alex Jiménez: I like that. What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned from failure?
CarrieAnne Cormier: I love failure. I welcome it. The most valuable lesson? I would say that it’s okay to fail. There’s such a stigma around it, that it’s not okay to fail and you’ve got to be perfect at everything. And it’s okay. Life goes on.
Alex Jiménez: All right. Last question from this round. If you weren’t in banking, what would you be doing?
CarrieAnne Cormier: Fun known fact, I started out wanting to be an elementary school teacher, which I do not think I would want to do now. After having three kids, that’s a lot of work. I don’t know.
Alex Jiménez: Well, you’re going to be a YouTube influencer.
CarrieAnne Cormier: I think that’s where it is. I’m with you. No one ever sets out to be a banker.
Alex Jiménez: That’s right. My dad will remind me that I have an engineering degree. All right, I do have one last question. What is the one step forward you would challenge every banking leader listening to take after this episode?
CarrieAnne Cormier: Can I take a hot second? Okay. Here’s what I struggle with. I was talking about this on my show, just because we’re talking about YouTube. I get really frustrated when people talk about data. Love data. But people don’t follow it.
I think it was The Financial Brand or something that talked about where Gen X, Millennials, Gen Alpha are getting their financial information. Most of it is from YouTube or TikTok. But where do marketing teams invest their marketing dollars? It’s still in newspaper ads. It’s still in, well, we’re going to buy a page.
I encourage people to open up their eyes. See what’s around them. Watch the trends. They’ll tell you a story if you listen. Just follow that data. And it doesn’t have to be numbers, just trends.
Alex Jiménez: That’s great. I totally agree with you. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I will continue watching your YouTube channel.
CarrieAnne Cormier: Oh, thank you so much. This has been great. I really appreciate it.
Alex Jiménez: I’m very happy to have you. Thanks so much.