Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Croal.
The Agile Upstream Group has been serving the document, data, and process management needs of the upstream oil and gas industry since 1990. Michael met some of the executives and staff of Agile Upstream when all were at prior jobs supporting the document, data, and process management needs of the banking industry in the mid-2000’s. Michael left a 19 year career at Hancock Whitney Bank in 2006 after recovering the Gulfport MS headquarters from the disaster known as Hurricane Katrina. Michael consulted to mid-sized banks and credit unions around the country for 9 years. After seeing the same process issues over and over, the underutilization of technology, and recognizing that these banks and credit unions didn’t have the vision, skills, resources, or time to transform themselves from paperbound manual processes to high performing digital operations, Michael joined the Agile Upstream Group in 2015 and started the Agile Banking division with the goal of providing consulting and solutions to community banks and credit unions.
The union of Michael and Agile Upstream came about as the result of Michael’s relationship with one of the Agile Upstream executives, Kurt Kemmerly. Michael met Kurt while Michael was with Hancock Whitney. While Michael was consulting, a Seattle-based bank client needed technical resources for a document imaging project. Michael introduced the bank to Agile Upstream which effectively put Agile Upstream into the banking space. When Michael decided to leave consulting and join Agile Upstream, he brought over many of his banking clients to continue their digital transformations.
Michael’s background is computer programming and math with extensive experience in bank operations. As Vice President of Banking Solutions at Agile Banking, Michael Croal puts 30 years of experience in all aspects of banking operations and technology to work in the areas of process improvement, document imaging, lending solutions, and business intelligence.
Michael is considered an expert in efficient process design, workflow, and data integration and has been responsible for leading numerous enterprise technology initiatives during his career. He has significant experience in lending, retail delivery, bank operations, information management and process re-engineering. Michael is an experienced professional speaker and author of The Agile Way newsletter and blog.
Prior to joining Agile Banking, Michael was Senior Director with Cornerstone Advisors, where he was among the authors of The Cornerstone Report, GonzoBanker, and CU Management, a publication of the Credit Union Executives Society. In addition to a decade of consulting to banks and credit unions across the country, Michael’s extensive banking experience comes from his 19 years with Hancock Whitney Bank. As Senior Vice President he led Hancock’s complex core and ancillary disaster recovery effort following Hurricane Katrina and was recognized by the Board of Directors for exemplary leadership in the face of this disaster. During his tenure at Hancock, Michael also served in executive level positions in Deposit Operations, Loan Operations, and Information Technology.
Michael served on the board of AIIM, the Association for Image and Information Management, and holds AIIM Certifications as Enterprise Content Management Specialist, Electronic Records Management Practitioner and Certified Information Professional.
Michael graduated from Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, and received his Master of Business Administration Degree in Banking from Troy University, Troy, Ala. He has completed graduate level banking programs at Vanderbilt University, Louisiana State University and the University of Mississippi.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Breaking into the banking space as a new entity is tough for several reasons. Banks are cautious by nature and tend to rely on their core vendor for ancillary technology solutions and support. As an unknown, Agile Banking has had to develop a brand and a reputation nearly from scratch.
Process improvement and digital transformation is very difficult work because it requires people to change the way they work. It requires access to and usage of data that banks have historically been very poor at. Getting the C-suite to view process improvement, document imaging, workflow, and data management as strategic is complicated by the fact that the C-suite is so far removed from how the work is actually done that they don’t see the waste in terms of bad processes, they just see what seems to be a lot of people pushing paper.
Please tell us about Agile Banking, a division of the Agile Upstream Group.
We provide solutions and consulting for community banks and credit unions around the country. Our focus is on internal processes, the use of document imaging, workflow, and data to create very high-performing digital processes. Our flagship product, Agile Classifier Extractor (ACE) is cutting-edge, artificial intelligence that greatly improves the efficiency of handling of documents related to customers and accounts. Many banks spend hours of manual labor scanning loan documents, classifying them into what they are (promissory note, deed of trust, flood insurance, etc.), and manually comparing the contents of the documents to other sources of information. We automate this complete workstream so the process becomes one of managing exceptions rather than the repetitive, mundane work that it is today.
Our Bank-In-A-Box product gets banks and credit unions up and running on the right track for document management and workflow fast. We pride ourselves in quickly identifying creative ways of leveraging technology to design very high-performing digital processes.
Our experience in technology and banking, and our willingness to integrate into other vendor’s software to sell a process sets us apart from traditional banking vendors that are more interested in selling licenses and leaving it up to the bank to implement and integrate the software into a process. This rarely happens which is why banking processes look like something Dr. Frankenstein would have designed. Bankers are bankers, not digital process architects. Their traditional vendors have let them down.
Agile Banking is also known for its blog/newsletter, The Agile Way. Newsletter archive and to subscribe is at www.agile-banking.com\newsletter
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Getting to the work of doing the work sooner would have been something I would have done differently. It didn’t take 9 years to see the root cause of process problems at banks. I would have left consulting sooner and started providing solutions. There’s a world of difference in being a Dilbert-esque management consultant writing assessment reports and doing nothing to actually fix the problems, and being part of a professional services firm full of skilled digital labors who get their fingernails dirty with bits and bytes. I love solving complex problems, the types of problems that senior bankers would rather leave to their successor than try and tackle on the tail end of their career.
Pricing:
- Agile Classifier Extractor is subscription based on the number of pages classified.
- Tier 0-250,000 pages $30,000 annual
- Tier 1-500,000 pages $50,000 annual
- Tier 2-1,000,000 pages $75,000 annual
- Tier 3-2,000,000 pages $100,000 annual
- Agile Consulting and Professional Services are typically hourly based
- Consulting $260 / hr
- Professional Services $187.50 / hr
- Bank-In-A-Box $25,000
Contact Info:
- Address: 33130 Magnolia Cir, Ste A
Magnolia, TX 77381 - Website: www.agile-banking.com
- Phone: 281-863-9349
- Email: michaelc@agile-banking.com
- Twitter: @CroalDude
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcroal/
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