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 infrastruc-
ture 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.—
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(^180) than 30 minutes”
AUGUST 2019
GATEWAY FIRST BANK