Alkami Technology: Customer Conversions Run on Roughly 10-Month Timelines, and Day-One Call Volume Still Overwhelms Even Doubled Call Centers
Webinar hosted by ProSight Financial Association, October 7, 2026
Alkami Technology used a ProSight Financial Association webinar to make its case that the larger risk for community banks is staying on an aging digital banking platform, not switching off it. The session featured two Alkami implementation executives and two recent bank customers, National Exchange Bank of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and the $2 billion Tri City National Bank in Greater Milwaukee. The format was vendor-sponsored and no financial guidance was given. It still gives investors an unusually candid view of what a conversion costs a client, where it breaks, and how Alkami positions its services against competitors.
Conversion Complexity Remains the Main Brake on Switching
Alkami cited its own research showing that about 23% of digital banking decision-makers name overall conversion complexity as the single biggest barrier to switching providers. Katie Doll, Director of Services Operations, framed this as perception rather than evidence of failure: "That finding doesn't mean that conversions are inherently unsuccessful. It just tells us that complexity is often perceived before the institution makes a fully decided decision." She also acknowledged that modernization often ranks lowest among a bank's priorities, and that the cost of staying put accumulates slowly through weaker engagement and slower innovation.
Both bank executives backed the argument. Nicholas Bandoch, Chief Brand Officer at Tri City, said his bank had grown unhappy with its prior provider after "the accumulation of issues" and used a burning-house analogy: "There is a risk that you might get hurt on the way out if you try to flee, but you're probably for sure going to get hurt if you stay." That is a testimonial, not market data. The 23% figure also suggests that Alkami's sales cycle still has to overcome inertia in addition to competing with rival vendors.
Day-One Demand Overwhelmed Even a Doubled Call Center
The most useful operational detail for investors is how much strain go-live puts on the client. Tri City converted about 40,000 users and doubled its call center by pulling staff from branches and other departments. Bandoch said: "Even a 2x call center, I will tell you, was not enough on day 1." Doll said Alkami now tells clients to plan for a 200% to 300% increase in call volume in the first week, and she recommended load-testing phone systems and routing digital banking calls to option 1 on the phone menu.
These burdens fall on the client rather than on Alkami, but they affect how smoothly a conversion goes and how likely the client is to recommend the vendor. Tri City reported no material change in deposit dollars or account counts in the months after conversion, even though some customers could not get in for an hour or two. Bandoch's explanation was that "there's a lot more work to change your bank than it is to just be a little patient for 2 hours." Adoption rate was the main benchmark Tri City used, and he noted that Alkami, having run a couple of hundred conversions, holds the comparison data while the bank itself does not.
Resource Demands on Clients Are Significant
Tri City ran a 10-month implementation with 3 to 5 people working on it nearly full time, out of a workforce of about 350. It evaluated four providers, including the incumbent, with a 12-person committee, narrowed the field to two, and made in-person visits before deciding. Its core administrator was described as indispensable. National Exchange Bank used two co-project managers, a project team of 19 or 20 people drawn from every department, and a consultant from its core provider. National Exchange has been live on Alkami for about 1.5 years, and Tri City for just under 1 year.
Integration with the core system is a recurring risk. Both banks run the same core, and both described themselves as among the first few institutions to connect that core to Alkami. National Exchange's Julie Stigler said the bank knew going in that "there was going to be a couple of gaps or pitfalls along the way," and she credited Alkami for putting the right people on the calls. National Exchange also moved only its consumer platform and left its business banking on the incumbent, a limited scope that points to how large a full migration can feel. Investors should treat integrations on thinner core relationships as a possible source of project friction and delay.
Alkami's Implementation Differentiator: Solution Design and Early Risk Discovery
Robert Martinez-Harrison, Senior Director of New Logo Implementation Services, said Alkami structures implementations around people, process and technology, with program managers acting as the single point of contact. He argued the key differentiator is solution design: Alkami's technical staff review the client's existing platform, then build a customized test environment that shows where the experience differs, rather than a static demo. He said this lets clients test an environment that mirrors what they will actually run.
Doll gave a concrete example. During a review of one client's existing system, someone mentioned clicking through to international bill pay, a custom tool nobody had scoped. Catching it at that stage avoided a discovery that would otherwise have come about 8 months later, during client testing. Stigler said she had faced a similar late-surfacing issue, and she advised future clients to be exhaustive about integrations and processes during scoping because "it may not be as simple as an API." The anecdote supports Alkami's claim of earlier risk detection, though it is a single example.
Data Hygiene and Scope Cleanup Are Underestimated
Bandoch said Tri City benefited from cleaning up roughly 80 miscellaneous deposit products on its core, which reduced the mapping and feature work during implementation. He said the bank underestimated data cleanup, specifically how inconsistent contact data becomes on a core that has been in place for decades. Phone numbers, for example, could sit in any of three fields. Doll stressed that clean email and phone data is essential for any conversion, and Bandoch described the resulting loop: "Hard to get people to update their contact information if you can't reach them because you have bad contact information." Poor client data hygiene is a common source of added work and customer friction at go-live, and no vendor can fully fix it.
Lessons on Go-Live Weekend and Commercial Customers
Both banks identified the weekend before go-live as a pressure point. Tri City ran its file conversion and exception work remotely, with 5 to 10 people on keyboards from Friday evening through Sunday night, and Bandoch said, "I didn't appreciate how burned out everybody was" heading into the busiest week. National Exchange gathered its team in one location, and Stigler credited that arrangement with keeping the process manageable.
Tri City moved 300 business customers in a later wave, about 25% of the bank's dollars, with roughly 20 bankers each looking after 15 to 20 accounts, and a six-person triage team behind them. The bank found some commercial functions complex enough to warrant that separate approach. This suggests commercial and treasury functionality carries more migration risk than consumer, which is relevant if Alkami wants to expand its business banking footprint.
Assessment
This was a marketing webinar, so the testimonials and the 23% statistic should be read as favorable, vendor-selected evidence. Neither bank gave financial results, retention rates, or comparisons with the competitors it rejected. Even so, the session was more candid than most vendor presentations about the negatives. Clients described burnout, undersized call centers, core integration gaps and data problems, and the 200% to 300% call-volume guidance sets an expectation that is itself a warning. Alkami's strongest evidence of a service edge is the solution design process and the single-point-of-contact program management model, but the session offered no data showing that these produce faster timelines or better retention than rivals achieve. The 10-month implementation and the heavy staffing demands at a $2 billion bank show that conversions remain substantial projects, which supports the sales-cycle friction Alkami itself identified.