FOUNDED 
1986
SIZE 
113 Employees
LOCATION 
Boston, MA

How a small IT team built an app that delivers credit decisions, fast.

OneUnited Bank is on a mission to be the premier banking institution for low-to-moderate-income urban communities. The Boston-based bank has seized the opportunity to establish a national footprint online using Salesforce.

“We started to build more and more data about our customers into Salesforce so we could have that single pane of glass, that 360-degree view everybody is looking for. And it has transformed our business.”

— Jim Slocum, CIO

"We launched the UNITY Visa program in 90 days — half the time of the competition’s quotes. It was incredible.”

— Jim Slocum, CIO

The
business
challenge

The business challenge

When OneUnited Bank’s five-person IT team needed to develop a secured credit card product for customers whose credit ratings had suffered during the recession, they turned to Salesforce. The team had little time — and no extra resources. The non-negotiables: The solution needed to be scalable, trusted, secure, and easy for a small team to build and maintain.
THE SOLUTION  

The
solution

The solution

CIO Jim Slocum did his due diligence before deciding on Salesforce for this new initiative. “I was looking at the standard list of partners that I would normally turn to,” he said. “Every single one of them said we were doing something no one else was doing and that what I was asking for would take six months.”

 

Fortunately, Slocum was not only able to help his team rise to the occasion, but even go above and beyond — thanks to the help of Salesforce. Leveraging Salesforce Service Cloud, which team members had deployed in 2006 to handle an influx of new customers joining the company’s online channel, they used solutions from Salesforce App Cloud to build the UNITY Visa Secured Credit Card app.

THE BUSINESS CHALLENGE  

90
DAYS

from idea to app.

Featured App: UNITY Visa Secured Credit Card

The UNITY Visa Secured Credit Card app features dynamic forms, lead tracking, and tight integration with back-end credit systems.

 

“We launched the UNITY Visa program in 90 days — half the time of the competition’s quotes,” Slocum said. “It was incredible.” It was a success not just for Slocum’s team and OneUnited Bank’s customers, but for the whole organization. In fact, after the launch, when OneUnited Bank’s President Teri Williams returned from a trip to Europe with the Salesforce1 Mobile App installed on her iPad, she was so up to date on the UNITY Visa’s progress that she recommended adjusting the approval criteria because too many good applications were being denied.

 

“It was very clear to me,” said Slocum, “that she had spent her overseas trip deep in the Salesforce1 Mobile App, checking out every dashboard and every report on our program.” Since then, Slocum said he and his team have been working to transfer all OneUnited Bank’s legacy applications onto the Salesforce platform.

It was incredible."

– Jim Slocum, CIO
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