Last year I wrote that it was hard to believe it’s the end of another year. In contrast, this year sometimes felt it would never end. It’s cliché to say that 2020 was a challenging year for everyone, both personally and professionally, but it’s true – and I want to thank everyone who weathered the storm with us.
I’m especially proud of our team and how quickly we adapted and rose to this year’s situation. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we promptly emptied our offices, sent team members home, and worked together as a remote team – many of us for the first time. Despite everyone uprooting their work environments and lives, we never missed a beat. New initiatives, product updates, and marketing campaigns were rolled out at a record pace. We built new policies and procedures, adapted as a team, and utilized our offshore resources. All of which forced us to mature and strengthen as an organization.
With credit union branches either closed or empty throughout the nation, fewer members were walking through their doors. Perhaps now more than ever, valuable data and actionable insights are the lifeblood of credit unions, allowing them to maintain contact, sell new products, and deliver meaningful service. These changing norms have strengthened Trellance’s commitment to be the leading provider of data analytics and business intelligence solutions, and we are proud to have assisted credit unions through such an unprecedented time.
Trellance Committed to Delivery Through Innovation and Expansion
2020 was a year of massive innovation and expansion for Trellance. Against the backdrop of COVID-19, we announced and delivered new initiatives, powerful product updates, updated services, and innovative marketing efforts at a rapid pace.
Innovation: Our M360 data analytics platform underwent unprecedented innovation this year, providing more value than ever to the ever-growing number of credit unions on our platform. In July, we delivered the most powerful and significant update in the platform’s history. The product release included all-new data visualization dashboards with configurable metrics and KPIs by department, MeridianLink Loans PQ and Finestra Fusion Mortgagebot loan origination connectors, content and functionality updates to the app store, and a revamped partnership program featuring diverse and influential new partners. Additional enhancements included comprehensive visualization dashboards for Microsoft Power BI and Tableau users, allowing credit unions to monitor and measure vital metrics.
In Q3, we announced powerful new cloud capabilities that not only allow credit unions to access data-centered insights more quickly but also serve as the platform for scientific data modeling, comparative financial industry benchmarks, and more predictive insights. The result is new features that continue to elevate M360 and make it unlike anything else on the market, providing faster implementations, easier software updates, and lower total cost of ownership.
Trellance will soon release a Q4 update for M360, featuring exciting updates including integrations with two new cores and two new ancillaries’ software, as well as a suite of new visualization dashboards. These additions demonstrate Trellance’s continual commitment to both cloud and on-premises solutions for the M360 platform.
In the spring, Trellance added a new credit card acquisition program to its managed service offerings and expanded its consulting services to now cover all seven of its data management disciplines. Using a digital platform backed by analytics, the program serves as a card portfolio growth catalyst, enabling credit unions to achieve higher conversion rates of potential cardholders. Clients can further define the member experience through program collateral and compliant tools; they can even design the website experience, cardholder messaging, and pre-qualification parameters.
Finally, Trellance expanded its consulting services. Built on successful data management consulting engagements that define desired program maturity and assess program gaps, Trellance’s consulting services now cover all seven of its data management disciplines: data governance, data architecture, metadata, data quality, data lifecycle, data analytics, and data privacy. These new additions form a comprehensive data management consultant offering.
Expansion: The driving force behind Trellance’s leaps in innovation this year was our explosion in growth. Despite the pandemic, Trellance will have hired 71 new employees before the end of the year – 14 of which were onboarded entirely remotely. Currently, Trellance has grown to 129 employees company-wide.
We celebrated Mark Zook assuming the chairman’s seat on the Trellance Board of Directors and welcomed two new board members – Tiffany Ford, CEO of University of Michigan Credit Union, and Jim Mears, CEO of Bayport Credit Union. These additions and changes helped to keep Trellance on track throughout 2020 and position us for greater levels of success in 2021.
Finally, to celebrate the transformative year that Trellance had, we capped the year with a bold new look via a significant rebrand. The new logo and design for Trellance not only encapsulates how the organization has emerged from 2020 stronger and more mature than before, but also demonstrates our commitment to being leaders in state-of-the-art data solutions for financial institutions in 2021.
Looking Ahead to 2021 – And Beyond
As the world begins the process of emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic next year, the transformative growth that Trellance underwent this year provides a unique advantage. The focus for Trellance in 2021 will be on offering an even better user experience and best-in-class SaaS solution.
The growing demand for cloud-based data analytics and insights will continue next year, likely accelerated by new experiences and habits formed during COVID-19. Trellance is currently onboarding its first credit union to the cloud version of M360 and plans to have many exciting announcements regarding the cloud and its capabilities throughout the year.
The inclusion of predictive analytics next year will continue to elevate M360 and its value to credit unions, with use cases launched throughout the year. Predictive analytics will enable credit unions to more seamlessly integrate with Trellance apps and trigger actions without any human interaction necessary. This will provide more insights to credit unions, allowing them to act faster, better utilize data, and be more responsive. A predictive analytics proof of concept, involving five credit unions and a third-party machine learning platform, is currently underway.
Other planned additions include powerful updates to the platform’s dashboards and visualizations, offering an even more detailed level of data at a glance. In fact, we’re already looking beyond 2021 and into 2022, where we’ll be unveiling more features and benefits for credit unions that encourage them to join the platform.
While 2020 has been a transformative year, it’s just the start of what will be a cutting-edge decade for Trellance. I look forward to sharing new advancements, expansions, solutions, and announcements in the coming months.
Wishing you and your team a happy, and safe, holiday season.
Tom Davis
President and CEO
Trellance
Learn more about credit union data solutions, download the Trellance Product Portfolio pdf.
