The Alloy Labs Alliance, a consortium of community and regional banks looking to quicken the pace of innovation across the industry for smaller banks, has added a big partner to the mix.

The American Bankers Association recently announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with the group to help foster innovation and technology adoption throughout its membership.

The group is seeking to level the playing field with financial giants who have spent millions of dollars building internal innovation labs and hiring full-time innovation teams to work on new technology

Alloy was launched last year by 20 charter member institutions in private beta last year and by 12 founding banks from across the country, including Reading Cooperative Bank.

“RCB has long been committed to delivering the products and services our customers want and need,” Julieann Thurlow, president and CEO of Reading Cooperative Bank, said in a statement. “Being part of the Alloy Labs Alliance allows us to bring new innovations to market quickly and efficiently. New digital products and tools are increasingly a part of the equation in this rapidly changing world. We now have access to all of the newest technology and a chance to access some of the latest thinking in the industry; plus, we have an opportunity to learn and share best practices with our peers from all over the country.”

Alloy Labs is a cooperative model of shared innovation and costs, as members join peer work groups to create innovative products and services in the areas such as peer-to-peer payments, small business lending, and digital customer onboarding. All of the aforementioned subjects are hot topics in the banking industry today.

“No bank can afford not to innovate in this day and age, but it’s not very efficient or even very effective for them to try to do it all themselves internally,” FinTech Forge’s Co-founder JP Nicols said in a statement. “We built the Alloy Labs Alliance as a shared innovation lab to help member banks share the costs and the risks of testing and trying new things in a structured and managed process, but maybe even more importantly, they can share the learnings with their peers so they can get to market more quickly.”