It’s a constant balancing act for community financial institutions. If you use all your software ”out of the box,” you risk looking just like everybody else. If you customize your environment too heavily, you can end up with a support nightmare that none of your vendors can help with.

In this episode of Digital Banking Podcast, host Josh DeTar welcomed Bill Kinnelly, the CEO of KGA Advisory, LLC. They discussed the pitfalls of being on a customization island, the potential problems with development, and the positives and negatives of an SDK (software development kit) approach.

No two community financial institutions are the same, so of course, no two FI technology environments are the same. Every financial technologist wants to create a user experience that’s perfect for their FI’s accountholders, not one that’s perfect for the FI down the street. Customization is one option. But whether you have your vendor do the customization or do it all in-house, customization has risks. It adds cost and it adds complexity, both up front and over time. Are the risks worth the rewards. No two financial institutions will have the exact same answer to that question either.