The bottom line for trust in financial services? IT.
When legacy IT systems work against employees at financial institutions, the consequences reach far beyond the help desk
Key takeaways
At banks and credit unions, legacy service desks created compliance blind spots and employee frustration, problems that directly undermine institutions built on reliability and trust
Consolidating onto a unified platform improves SLA resolution rates above 90% across financial institutions of different sizes and geographies
Modernizing IT service management in banking spreads beyond IT into HR, facilities, compliance, and operations
When it takes longer to process a ticket than it does to solve a problem, well, that's the problem. And for financial institutions that sell trust, delays and cumbersome legacy platforms weaken that promise to customers and employees alike.
For Bangor Savings Bank, this was daily life. Helpdesk associates would take a support call, resolve the issue, and then spend even longer (sometimes 45 minutes) logging it, fighting a system so sluggish that employees dreaded using it. Administrators spent hours navigating complex settings. The tool that was supposed to help IT serve the bank actively worked against them.
Bangor isn't alone. Across financial services, IT leaders are confronting a version of the same gap: systems built for a simpler era now buckling under acquisitions, regulatory complexity, organic growth, and rising employee expectations.
The firms closing that gap are consolidating fragmented tools onto unified platforms, deploying automated workflows in weeks rather than quarters, and giving employees systems that work with them instead of against them.
Disappearing a ticket “black hole”
At Bangor Savings Bank, things were so bad that employees started skipping tickets altogether and employee surveys returned the same complaint every year about the ticket black hole, where requests got assigned to another team and then vanished.
"It got to the point where we couldn't live with it anymore," says Justin Fournier, SVP of infrastructure and support.
Fournier's first priority was to get a clear picture of his operation, which was mired in backlogs, incomplete data, and email-based requests. He implemented Freshservice and began by aiming at workflows, refining them with one team before rolling out to the next, and so on. SLA resolution hit 95% across 30,000 quarterly tickets, up from roughly 80% at launch. The change management process that once took 45 minutes now takes five. And the demand for the platform spread organically as HR, facilities, purchasing, and employee development all asked to join, something that had never happened with the old system.
Read more: Bangor Savings Bank scales service excellence
Consolidating workflows
Ticket-logging processes create their own problems, but for Creditsafe, a credit reporting agency operating in 20 countries with 500 distributed tech staff, the problem was collaboration. Customer support teams in-country and shared engineering teams elsewhere were supposed to collaborate on the same issues. Instead, they worked on separate platforms. As tickets failed to make the move from one system to another, they disappeared, so teams fell back on email, which often similarly vanished.
"Anything you wanted to do of any complexity required significantly high skill levels," says Mark Hall, senior manager in service delivery.
The company consolidated on Freshservice, including moving the major incident process out of two separate third-party tools, so that CMDB mapping now surfaces whether a recent change might be causing an outage. To connect teams, it also integrated with the company’s existing Freshdesk instance. Resolution rates hit 90% within eight working hours. "The integration gives us much-needed visibility into the entire support lifecycle," says CIO Brian McGeough.
Read more: Breaking silos, building trust: Creditsafe’s support revolution
From email router to enterprise platform
IT teams are often on the front lines of rapid growth, absorbing a greater number of employees and technologies. In a few short years, STCU had grown from a regional credit union into a 50-branch operation spanning eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and eastern Oregon, approaching 300,000 members.
Midway through that expansion, Greg Gallaway, VP and director of IT, recognized the systems underneath couldn't keep pace. STCU's on-premises service desk was "a glorified email router," he says, used only by IT, prone to missed work and failed escalations.
Gallaway wanted a platform open enough to extend across the organization so that accounting could stop chasing invoice approvals through disconnected email threads, HR could manage job description reviews through structured workflows, and the service catalog could route requests to the right team with the right information the first time. After implementing Freshservice, first-contact resolution hit 82.8%, nearly seven points above the industry standard. Employee satisfaction reached 100%.
Read more: STCU extends culture of service to employees
Modernizing IT before modernizing the bank
Leeds Building Society, a U.K. financial services organization with roughly 1,800 employees that provides mortgage lending and savings products, was about to undertake the biggest initiative in its history: replace its entire core banking platform. In preparation, the IT team realized that the IT systems underneath couldn't support the business they already had. Service requests required manual approval and used a single form for everything, forcing users to scroll through pages of dropdowns. Asset data was scattered across tools with no single source of truth—a risk that, in a regulated financial services environment, helped build the business case for change. Employee surveys consistently flagged the same problems: aging tools, slow resolution, too many manual processes. In other words, not ready to match a modern banking platform.
Within months of setting up Freshservice, the team deployed 70-plus automated workflows, built a consolidated CMDB, and watched SLA adherence climb from 82% to 96%. Mean resolution time dropped by 3x. The mortgage and savings transformation now runs on infrastructure that keeps up with the pace of banking today.
Read more: Modern ITSM supports Leeds Building Society’s digital transformation
