Alkami Technology’s platform humanizes digital banking so banks and credit unions can confidently grow, adapt quickly, and build a thriving digital community. The company ensures clients are successful in the digital banking age by delivering the nation’s most successful cloud-based digital banking platform. Founded 10 years ago, Alkami is one of the fastest-growing privately held technology companies in the U.S. With every Alkamist having ownership in Alkami, they are obsessively intentional about their culture: optimistic-perseverance, caring-collaboration, transparent-communication, courageous-innovation, trusted-accountability, and real-fun. Beyond intentional culture, their commitment is to attract and retain amazing talent by fostering a high-growth, dynamic and rewarding environment; providing great benefits; making meaningful investments in learning and development; celebrating successes together in remarkable ways; and, ACTing together by taking time to give back and volunteer. We spoke with Alkami’s Chief HR Officer, Adrianne Court, about how their business operations were altered in response to the Covid-19 crisis, as well as the culture attributes that helped them to successfully transition, even thrive during this pandemic period, and what she’s most excited about Alkami accomplishing over the past year.
Comparably: How has the pandemic shifted the way Alkami operates and how have your people responded?
Adrianne Court: In order to answer this question, it is important to understand some of the fundamentals necessary in terms of how companies can survive in a pandemic environment like this. To me, there are three fundamentals – financial, type of service or product, and company culture. To begin, the first is, does the business offer a service or product that is needed or critical during a period such as what we are in with COVID-19?
At Alkami, we innovate, build, and deliver tools and technology that offer banks and credit unions the ability to connect with and serve their customers in a digital way. This is what is known as the digital banking channel (in essence it is their “virtual” bank branch). During the pandemic with banks and credit unions temporarily shuttering the doors of their branches to help stop the spread of COVID-19, offering the digital ability to bank is an essential service. A digital “branch” allows the bank and credit union employees to work remotely and safely while continuing to offer banking capabilities to their customers. In fact, the digital “branch” was quite important when the U.S. government issued billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief funds. Consumers could access the funds they needed immediately digitally with our bank and credit union clients instead of waiting for physical checks to arrive in the mail. Even if they did receive a physical check, having the ability to deposit digitally was extremely important.
The second is the financial backing and the ability to sustain the trust of your investors during a crisis period. Alkami is fortunate that our investors are connected with us as long-term strategic investors that believe in building and are not short-term thinkers. They understand the great value in investing in the people and an organization like Alkami and the return this brings longer-term. In fact, our investors made additional investments in us during the pandemic.
The first was offering a product or service essential during a crisis period and the second is having the financial backing. The third, and I would argue the glue for the first and second, is having an intentional culture that can sustain an organization and carry it through a crisis period. This is the way an organization thinks, acts, and interacts. This is tested in times of great crisis and stress.
At Alkami, trust, collaboration and caring are fundamental to our culture in how we work and connect physically together, so this naturally helped us to transition, and not only to survive working remotely but to thrive together.
So, back to your question – did the pandemic shift our business operations? You know, actually it hasn’t shifted as much for us as we may have thought it would prior to the pandemic. We continue to collaborate, connect, care, and demonstrate optimistic-perseverance – it has simply stretched us to rethink and re-imagine how we express this together remotely and virtually. As an example, we had never completed a fully virtual implementation with our clients prior to the pandemic – we always worked together on-site. Our Alkamists across the organization came together (virtually, of course) to re-imagine and re-invent our approach to implementations with great grit, perseverance, and fierce collaboration. Not only were we successful in doing this within the first week of working remotely, but we have also now duplicated this many times and it has become a competency to successfully launch and implement with clients virtually.
Comparably: How would you describe Alkami Technology’s workplace culture, and what attributes would you say contributed to your success amid the COVID crisis?
Adrianne Court: Culture and intentionality around our culture is top of mind for us all the time. It is a competitive differentiator for us and clients tell us this. When you think about prospective clients that are selecting technology partners, most SaaS company contracts are 18 months to two years on average compared to ours, which on average are over six years. For clients that consider partnering with us, it is critical for them to understand who they will be hanging out with as their digital banking partner for multiple years instead of the typical mindset of, “Hey, if it doesn’t work out, we can look for a different provider in a year or two.”
Our clients being community banks and credit unions are hyper-focused on culture and how they connect in their communities. They, therefore, seek out partners like Alkami with intentional cultures. In fact, our sales team at Alkami will tell you that 80 to 85% of our clients consider culture within their top final decision factors when selecting us.
How do we describe our culture? It is articulated in our Culture Compounds. “Compounds” are defined as things that are combined and are mixed together to form a whole. For us, our Culture Compounds mix together to express how we think, act, and connect with our Alkamists, clients, and communities. This is how we unite together:
- Optimistic Perseverance
- Transparent Communication
- Trusted Accountability
- Caring Collaboration
- Courageous Innovation
- Real Fun
We are obsessive about communicating, over-communicating, and doing things that reinforce and reflect our culture. As shared above, one of our culture compounds is Caring-Collaboration. We recognized early on during the pandemic with remote working that many of our Alkamists found themselves working at home and “homeschooling” their children with schools being closed abruptly. We created communities through our internal communication channel (we use Slack) to create connections. As an example, a channel called “Kiddos at Home” was dedicated for parents to share best practices and tips, and how they are managing through this new dynamic, etc. Facilitating a space where they can openly discuss the serious challenges or share lighthearted fun moments with photos is one way we created a sense of community cross-functionally. In fact, our CTO was one of the first to post in this channel to demonstrate that even at the executive-levels, we are all in this together
Other channels were leveraged to create connections and bonds while we all were social distancing. One of the favorites is for those working at home with four-legged friends as their coworkers – “Doggos at Home.” This is a dedicated community of folks that share the fun and interesting things that come with managing working from home with four-legged friends. The photos of the pups just make your smile during the workday. We also recognized that we have people feeling isolated as well, so we have a channel called “Home Alone” for employees to connect in that way too.
Alkami is focused on fostering communication and connection. We recognized investing in our leaders to help them do this was of great importance. We also recognized that this was new territory for them too, so we developed engaging and multi-dimensional training with our leaders and people managers to learn and share on how to lead in this virtual world.
Of course, we could not ignore the importance of more tangible/physical things as well by sending “surprises” to our Alkamists’ homes. They particularly loved the snack boxes from SnackNation – for each box delivered, SnackNation donated an equivalent box to Feed America.
Building communication channels, investing in leadership training, connecting virtually, and even connecting physically, are just a few of many examples of what we have done to continue to reinforce our culture at Alkami in a remote and distanced environment.
Something very special our Alkamists do to continue to serve our communities is important to highlight as well: many of our Alkamists volunteers for an organization known as Bold Idea. They are volunteer mentors giving their time to spend with young minds to help them learn and gain interest in technology, particularly coding. Prior to COVID-19 and social distancing, this was facilitated in a physical presence where kids would come on-site to our offices. Our volunteers would do the mentoring and help them learn different elements of coding. When COVID began to spread, we couldn’t have the eager minds come on-site. Our volunteers were so committed to these children and the program that within in two short weeks, Alkami became the only location for all the Bold Idea locations that was able to pivot – creating a virtual and very engaging experience so the children could continue to learn and grow their interest in technology, see future career potential, and have visions for possibilities.
Comparably: Are there any guiding principles that you or your company live by?
Adrianne Court: Alkamists are guided by our Culture Compounds. It may be fun to first understand Alkami – it is actually the phonetically spelling for the word “alchemy.” Alchemists are known for practicing compounding by combining ordinary elements to turn lead into gold. At Alkami, our mission is to be the gold standard for our Alkamists, clients, and our communities. Embedded in everything we do are our Culture Compounds — they give us purpose, keep us diligent and committed to always doing the right thing – it is how we think, act, and connect. The concept is, when the compounds are combined together, our culture comes alive.
Alkami’s success has been guided by these Culture Compounds, starting with Optimistic-Perseverance. This means we are positive and determined, relentless, and diligent while driven to achieve success. Transparent-Communication reinforces to each of us to provide constructive feedback, share information appropriately and in a timely manner, and always with integrity.
Our culture continues through Trusted-Accountability, which means we are resolute in our commitments and we hold each other to the same. We do the right things always through sharing knowledge and learning incessantly. We emphasize and assume positive intent through Caring-Collaboration which demonstrates that we care about the successes of others while connecting collectively to achieve our goals together.
Courageous-Innovation means we encourage original thinking while seeking to identify emerging technology trends and translate ideas into action. During the pandemic, this could not be more important as we had to rethink and re-imagine how we work, collaborate, and connect internally and externally with our clients.
Very importantly, Real-Fun doesn’t mean we play games (although we have had some fierce virtual trivia, scavenger hunts, bingo, cooking challenges, and poker games). What Real-Fun means to us is taking time to recognize successes, celebrate important milestones, and work together to serve our communities. We have done this and done this well during the crisis period.
How do we know we are doing well as we live-out our culture in the remote world? Our Alkamists and our clients tell us so – through formal and informal channels. We are conducting pulse surveys every six weeks with our Alkamists with a focus on asking if they are seeing our culture translated and asking if we are doing the right things to support them during the pandemic. The scores have been phenomenal on a scale of 5 – every question is well above a 4 with the following having amongst some of the highest scores:
- How confident are you that we are doing the right things for our clients during this crisis?
- How effectively is Alkami collectively working remotely?
- How confident are you in Alkami’s leadership to make the right decisions to manage through this crisis?
Alkamists tell us that they feel that we are doing far above the other companies their spouses or friends are working for. Of course, we continue to grow and learn through this, but when Alkamists give us comments like below, we feel we are going in the right direction with respect to how we act and connect together:
- “I applaud everything Alkami has done. Very professional, informative, many channels to be able to communicate. Hats off and Kudos all around in all sincerity.”
- “There are a number of good things that came out of this. This validates that Alkami and Alkamists can pivot well together, and I attribute much of this to our culture. I brag to my family and friends about Alkami, and they really cannot believe it.”
Again, I can’t restate how important it is to express and reinforce your culture through the pandemic period and even amidst everything that is happening in our country today. We feel strongly about our culture and we’ve worked hard to communicate this to each of our Alkamists. Of course, we understand that we can do better. When we think about caring collaboration and trusted accountability in light of what’s happening in our country, we really think we can do better and this is simply part of learning incessantly. Through the voices of our Alkamists, we are facilitating bias training and investing more in our community efforts to ensure we are creating opportunities for amazing diverse talent.
Comparably: What are you most proud of that Alkami has achieved over the last year?
Adrianne Court: We announced on March 12th we were canceling our much-anticipated Client Conference – a mere 23 days from our scheduled start with over 500 planned to attend. It was a difficult and disappointing decision to make, but out of concern for the health and safety of our Alkamists and clients we felt it was the only responsible decision. However, our disappointment did not linger long as our teams quickly pivoted and put together a plan to host a “unique and special virtual event consistent with Alkami’s high standards.” Alkami was able to host UNITE only 56 days after cancelling our Client Conference with nearly 1000 attending virtually. This was accomplished despite having no existing playbook for how to host a virtual event, navigating work-from-home, and working with clients and technology partners who were facing uncertain times. It was a remarkable success! Our clients are now asking, “Can we do this again next year?” “Can we continue with a virtual as well as physical gathering?” I think that says a lot about our ability to pivot as well as the culture that reinforces our capabilities to collaborate and persevere.
It goes to show our clients have been impacted in a positive way! Some of our clients actually saw some of the things we’re doing and reached out to learn and take what we were doing so they could cascade that into their own organizations. That was an affirmation that they’re actually feeling our impact at a distance from us.
