Peter Chapman

Title: Senior Vice President, Emerging Technologies, First Trade Union Bank

Age: 32    

Experience: 10 years

Peter Chapman is not a banker in the traditional sense. At heart, he’s always been a bit of a tech junkie, and he cut his teeth in the banking industry as an IT auditor at Wolf & Co. From there, he went to Georgetown Bank to manage the bank’s internal system. But when he found himself at First Trade Union Bank in Boston, he noticed a different kind of vibe. “Immediately, I heard everyone talking about how they can use technology to empower the business,” he said. He sat down with Banker & Tradesman recently to chat about First Trade’s recent partnership with LevelUp, his own evolving role at the bank and being an early adopter at a community bank.

Q: How has your role at the bank shifted over the past few years?

A: My role here has slowly transitioned from more of an internal technologist to emerging technologies. I live where the technology and the brand meet the customer. We really lead with our digital channels, so I’m really a proponent for the customer. I think about the experience they’re having, and I try to engage the correct technology partners to try to create a better experience. That’s where I’ve been spending most of my time the past year.

When I came on board, we had online banking and that was it. About two years ago, we rolled out our first mobile application, a mobile deposit application. Shortly after that, we rolled out mobile banking. After that, we rolled out iPad application. We moved very quickly in this year and a half to offer the entire suite.

Q: FirstTrade recently partnered with LevelUp to roll out a new mobile payment app – how did that pairing happen?

A: Last fall, a couple of us sat down in a room and we were patting ourselves on the back a little bit, but also being very honest about who we were as a bank and where we were with this digital channel. While we were proud with how far we’d come, we realized that we wanted to do something different. At the time, Square had just announced their partnership with Starbucks. Everyone was talking about mobile payments, so we thought, what if we could be one of the first banks to roll out a mobile payments application?

I went out and started talking to different partners, and we fell into a very natural relationship with the people over at LevelUp. They’re right down the road, they’ve got a great vision, they have great leadership in Seth (Priebatsch), and they were eager to work with a company like us.

There were a ton of reasons why we wanted to do this, but I think the story was a big one. We were going to be the first to market, or be in production with something like this. I think there are maybe two or three banks that have a full production dual payment app right now.

We were trying to find a service that would help us better align ourselves with the digital natives or Generation Y. LevelUp has a million customers, and they’re the exact customers we’re going after. It seemed like a no-brainer. That’s really where we spent our last nine months: developing the application, figuring out what it was going to look like, what it was going to feel like.

Q: Do you think it’s more difficult to be an early adopter when you’re at a community bank?

A: Yes and no.

It’s more difficult because I don’t have 60 developers working for me, and I really have to depend a lot on vendor relationships and trying to get into a partner’s ear and guide them to bring me a product that I want.

Where it gets easier is, we are a smaller organization that’s nimble and believes in technology from the top down. We can sit in the room, come up with an idea and get on the same page in a matter of days. At a larger institution, I can only imagine what it’s like when they come up with a new feature or something they want to roll out, the types of committees they need to go through.

I think the community banking industry is typically viewed as very risk averse and slow to adopt certain types of technologies, but if you get the right people in the right place at a smaller organization and you get the right partners in place, you can actually beat the big boys to the punch