The American Banker article Top 10 Community Bank IT initiatives discusses a range of IT projects from 10 US community banks ranging in asset size from $130 million to $5.8 billion (Thanks to Matthew Findlay for the article link).

The money quote: “We are a community sized bank; we don’t have a huge amount of staff or a huge budget to go out and do these things,” he says. “If you think about the compliance, the marketing, the client support, all of those people had to be on the same page.”

Projects such as estatements, mobile banking, electronic communication with customers and process redesigns all need compliance input to ensure that any changes satisfy regulatory requirements.

Besides ensuring that the internal departments are aligned and co-ordinated it is essential that there is governance of the IT project: this starts with a contract setting out the cost and benchmarks to ensure that the project is completed on time and within budget and meets its goals.