Customer story
Forward Bank turns compliance drudgery into a high-velocity digital engine.
How Forward Bank took its Cash Management and Retail staff off the road, tiered every cash management customer by risk, and turned annual reviews into a 5-minute digital workflow.
Retail & commercial banking
Wisconsin
Executive perspective: the hidden cost center.
In retail and commercial banking, institutions often mistake compliance inertia for relationship management. Across regional and community banks, high-cost frontline talent — Cash Management and Retail staff — spend hundreds of unrecoverable hours acting as field couriers for basic administrative tasks.
For Forward Bank, annual cash management customer reviews were an acute operational bottleneck: a paper-heavy, geographically distributed, and risk-blind process that tied up frontline production in non-revenue travel and manual filing.
By deploying Identifee, Forward Bank systematically dismantled this legacy model — transforming an operational liability into a centralized, risk-calibrated, and audit-ready workflow.
The legacy baseline: 40 to 190 minutes per customer.
Before Identifee, Forward Bank ran customer reviews through a decentralized, field-service model. Every review followed the same path:
- 5 min Call & schedule
- Up to 150 min Round-trip windshield travel by retail staff
- 30 min In-person paper review
- 5 min Scan, tag & file
No upfront risk tiering. High-risk and zero-risk clients received the same costly in-person review.
-
Windshield time. Cash Management and Retail staff drove up to 2.5 hours round-trip to sit across a desk and work through paper checklists — more than 3 hours of staff time per customer at the high end.
-
Misallocated frontline talent. Commercial and branch managers worked as data collectors instead of focusing on deposit acquisition, credit origination, and portfolio defense.
-
Flat, risk-blind execution. Every customer received the same annual review regardless of risk — spending capital on low-risk profiles while diluting scrutiny on complex entities.
-
Scope creep and form drag. Disconnected paper forms carried products that needed no review, such as wire services, confusing customers and adding friction.
-
Decentralized audit risk. Wet-ink signatures, physical transit, manual scanning, and fragmented indexing created compliance gaps and slowed audit prep.
The transformation: centralized, digital, risk-tiered.
Forward Bank replaced field-level manual execution with Identifee's orchestration platform, re-engineering the review in three steps.
- 1 · Upfront risk tier Operations builds risk profiles and a dynamic review scope.
- 2 · Digital campaign A frictionless, mobile-friendly customer experience.
- 3 · 5-minute clearance Centralized review with an instant audit log.
Strategic operations focus
Instead of staff losing days on the road, Cash Management Operations manages client risk upfront — about 40 targeted hours to prepare risk assessments, prune non-review items like wires, and configure parameters.
A frictionless customer experience
Customers no longer coordinate schedules or host bankers for routine compliance checks. With Identifee's digital checklists and dynamic forms, they complete verifications on their own time, in minutes.
5-minute internal clearance
Operations processes standard submissions in 5 minutes. Complex exceptions and rejected submissions are resolved digitally in 10 to 20 minutes — without a single mile driven.
Embedded expert support
Identifee's dedicated solutions team helped Forward Bank calibrate launch schedules, resolve edge cases, and deliver a smooth technical deployment.
Performance scorecard: before and after.
| Operational dimension | Before Identifee | With Identifee | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retail staff travel time | Up to 150 minutes per visit | 0 minutes | 100% of non-value travel eliminated |
| Branch capacity per review | 40 to 190 minutes | 0 minutes, fully offloaded | 100% of retail capacity reclaimed |
| Risk-based methodology | None — uniform paper review | Granular, operationalized tiering | Compliance precision built into the process |
| Processing time | 10 minutes of manual admin and scanning | 5-minute standard digital review | 50% shorter internal cycle time |
| Audit posture | Fragmented scans and filing lag | Centralized, real-time audit trail | Exam-ready records on demand |
Core business outcomes: from cost center to capacity.
-
Frontline repositioning. Identifee helped free Forward Bank's Cash Management and Retail teams from administrative road trips. With dozens of hours returned, more time can be spent on relationship building — turning a non-value-add compliance cost into frontline growth capacity.
-
Risk maturity. High-risk accounts get the scrutiny they warrant; low-risk accounts clear quickly. Irrelevant modules are removed for good, speeding turnaround and cutting regulatory noise.
-
Modernization and retention. In-person meetings for paper sign-offs signal outdated infrastructure to commercial and cash management clients. A self-serve digital experience positions Forward Bank as a forward-thinking financial partner.
-
Audit-ready governance. Every action, change, and approval is tracked, timestamped, and exportable for state, federal, or internal auditors.
The verdict
“Identifee didn't just automate Forward Bank's reviews — it removed an entire operational bottleneck. By taking retail branch staff off the road, centralizing risk governance, and turning customer reviews into a 5-minute digital workflow, Forward Bank set a modern, scalable operational benchmark. It's been an absolute game-changer!”
About Forward Bank
Forward Bank is a Wisconsin-based financial institution serving individuals, businesses, and communities with retail, commercial, and cash management banking services.
About Identifee
Built by former bankers, Identifee is the modern operating platform that helps banks and credit unions acquire new customers, service customers, and grow revenue and deposits. The platform unifies task automation and customer management in a single, modular AI workspace — CRM, GenAI, prospecting, sales enablement, and learning — with each module working independently or connecting to 2,800+ existing systems.
Ready to write your own story?
Talk to our team about taking your customer reviews off the road and into a risk-tiered digital workflow.