We need flexibility to tailor our products to our customers' needs. Community banks are looking for several attributes in an e-banking vendor. The vendor must be very stable in terms of financials, development staff and company history. A relatively large experienced development staff and strong financial statements demonstrate that the vendor will likely be around for a while and won't put the bank in the position of having to convert to a different vendor or product because of the lack of further development and support for an e-banking solution. Along the same lines, banks should look at the existing customer base for a particular vendor to gauge the amount of experience and depth of penetration into the market the vendor holds.
Customer support is also a primary concern in selecting a vendor.
Most community banks lack the expertise to support e-banking products on their own and rely on prompt responses from vendors to resolve problems. That puts a bank in a better position to adapt to future trends in software design and to recover and convert data to support a new system if the need arises at a later date. The bank should also be able to design new products that will interface easily with existing applications and database. It's very important to select vendors that use one data base to support several products. For example, Highlands Union Bank selected Equifax E-Banking Solutions because they use one common SQL database to support online banking, telephone banking and corporate cash management products.