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-unu-
sual transformation from a mortgage
company into a bank is a process that
has been ongoing since the appoint-
ment 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 recognised
as essential to all financial services,
though the industry as a whole has
been slow to acknowledge that.—
Stephen Harpe,
CIO, Gateway First Bank“ 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(^242) than 30 minutes”
AUGUST 2019
GATEWAY FIRST BANK