GATEWAY FIRST BANK
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“ It used to take days , even weeks to get through an application process … but now on the mortgage side of the business we average less than 30 minutes ”
— Steven Harpe , CIO , Gateway First Bank transitions who replaced Stitt as CEO in August 2018 , Gateway acquired Farmers Exchange Bank to form Gateway First Bank which , with $ 1.2bn in assets and five banking centers in Northwest Oklahoma , emerged overnight as one of the largest banks in the State of Oklahoma by asset size , and one of the largest bank mortgage operations in the United States . The enabling technology team Growing the technology infrastructure to support the radical and highly-unusual transformation from a mortgage company into a bank is a process that has been ongoing since the appointment of Steven Harpe as CIO in 2013 . Harpe had held senior leadership roles in IT for more than 20 years . Back then , there wasn ’ t really a technology division in the present-day sense , he recalls : tech was seen as a black box , and the relationship with the rest of the business was an adversarial one . “ We had to develop a managed services concept within the business ,” Harpe explains .
Digital enablement is now recognized as essential to all financial services , though the industry as a whole has been slow to acknowledge that .
AUGUST 2019