First Farmers Bank and Trust: How to do Digital Account Opening

Has your bank struggling with digital account opening? Perhaps because of persistent fraud issues? First Farmers Bank and Trust (“FFBT”) was not happy with their existing account opening process, which could take up to 45 minutes to complete. They decided to work with a fintech named Prelim. Prelim’s technology was able to work with FFBT’s existing core system Fiserv. After implementing Prelim’s software and turning on the digital account opening the results could not have been better! The time to open an account dropped from 45 minutes to 10 minutes, a 78%-time savings. The number of digital account openings increased 86% through the first half of 2026. A 100% decline in identity fraud was realized. Prelim was able to put forth a solution that solves a major pain point for community banks. This episode reviewed an article from ICBA titled “First Farmers Bank and Trust: An innovative approach to digital account opening.” A link to the article is included below.

Link: First Farmers Bank & Trust - ICBA.org