Platform conversions look like technology projects from the outside. From the inside they are trust projects. Seventeen thousand retail customers logged in on a Monday morning expecting everything to be where they left it. None of the vendor change was theirs to absorb.
My role at The Bank of Commerce has been that conversion end to end, twice. Retail went live September 2024. Business and commercial followed in February 2026. Each was an eight month program: vendor alignment, mapping and configuration workbooks, a migration ticket backlog, test planning, and a rollback plan behind every cutover.
Product at the bank is a single person function. That means the roadmap across a 15 to 20 product estate, every digital vendor relationship from commercial teams through engineering, the fraud tooling integration, and the customer impacting incidents. There is nobody to hand a decision to, which means the person choosing the configuration is the person answering for it on Monday morning.
Selecting the bank's next online account opening platform ran seven months across four vendors, ended with a pitch to executive leadership, and won board approval. Getting it into the year meant reprioritizing the roadmap against the budget cycle and deferring an AI chat build so account opening could go first.
The pattern started at First Interstate Bank, where owning the Multiple Guarantors feature end to end opened the digital business loan flow to applicants who previously could not apply online at all. The surface is bigger now. The job has not changed: find what is blocking the customer and own the fix end to end.
