By Lokdeep Singh, CEO of Unily.
Lokdeep Singh is CEO of Unily. In this email interview with FinTech Edition, he explains what the merger of First Tech and Digital Federal Credit Union shows about employee experience in financial services, why First Tech reached 100% adoption of its digital workplace, why personalization matters as institutions grow more complex, and what the merger means for AI inside regulated institutions.
The First Tech and Digital Federal Credit Union merger created one of the largest credit union combinations in U.S. history. What does a merger of this scale reveal about the role employee experience plays in making or breaking a financial services transformation?
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A merger is often viewed primarily as a financial, operational, or technology exercise, but the hardest part is ultimately bringing people with you. When two organizations come together, employees are navigating new systems, new colleagues, new processes, and often a new sense of identity, all while customers still expect business as usual.
First Tech is a great example of why employee experience has to be treated as business infrastructure, not a standalone initiative. The organization needed to connect more than 3,000 employees across a newly expanded footprint while maintaining uninterrupted service to members. A unified digital workplace gave employees a single place to find trusted information, understand what was changing, and connect with colleagues.
The lesson for financial institutions is that transformation happens at the speed at which people can understand and adopt it.
Financial institutions are under enormous pressure to modernize while maintaining trust and stability. How can technology help organizations move faster without creating more complexity for employees?
It’s not that we have a shortage of technology. If anything, we have too much to navigate. Every new model, agent, app, and tool may add value on its own, but employees experience them all together and that creates complexity and friction.
Too often, organizations respond to complexity by adding more tools, platforms, and channels, when what employees actually need is fewer places to go and greater confidence that the information they’re seeing is relevant.
For First Tech, the goal was to create a single destination for communications, knowledge, and productivity resources, while tailoring the experience based on an employee’s role and needs. That distinction is important. A centralized experience doesn’t mean giving everyone the same information; it means giving people the right information from one trusted source.
For financial institutions where accuracy, speed, and trust are critical, reducing friction when it comes to employees finding information can have a direct impact on how quickly an organization can execute change. That matters even more as AI arrives. AI should take complexity out of the employee experience, not add another layer on top of it.
First Tech achieved 100% adoption of its digital workplace, alongside a 260% social engagement score. What do those numbers tell you about what employees actually want from workplace technology?
The most interesting thing about 100% adoption is what it tells us about behavior. Employees don’t consistently use workplace technology because they’re told to. They use it when it genuinely makes their working lives easier.
First Tech focused heavily on relevance and usability. Employees could access the information they needed, see updates relevant to their roles, and participate in conversations with colleagues through the same experience. That made the platform part of how people worked, rather than another destination they were expected to visit.
For me, that’s the difference between deploying technology and creating an employee experience. The best platforms earn their place in the daily workflow.
Personalization was a major part of First Tech’s approach. Why is relevance becoming so important as financial institutions become increasingly complex?
The information problem inside enterprises has become almost as significant as the information access problem. Employees today aren’t necessarily struggling to find information. They’re struggling to find the right information.
In a financial institution, that challenge becomes even more pronounced because employees can have completely different responsibilities, locations, regulatory requirements, and customer interactions. Sending everyone everything creates noise. Sending people what’s relevant helps them act.
First Tech’s approach used personalized news, role-relevant content, and targeted communications to make information more useful. Institutions should take note of this and lean into intelligent ways of curating the information they need to do their jobs as they prepare for the next generation of employee experience.
M&A often focuses heavily on systems integration. Should companies be thinking more about cultural and communication integration from day one?
During a merger, people don’t take action just because they have the information. Even when it’s the right information, they ask: What does this mean for me? Why does it matter? What exactly should I do next? If an organization can’t answer those questions clearly and consistently, uncertainty fills the gap and alignment starts to break down.
The same strategy also means something very different depending on where you sit. A senior leader sees the long-term vision, while a frontline employee in a branch wants to know what changes about their Monday morning schedule. Staying aligned through change means having one trusted source, one story translated for every audience, and channels where employees can ask questions and respond.
That’s why communication and employee experience should be built into the M&A strategy from the beginning and treated as a continuous initiative, not a communications workstream at the end. First Tech used its digital workplace to recruit change champions across the combined organization, which helped carry the change into every team. A shared digital environment becomes the connective tissue between two organizations while that new culture is being built.
We’re now seeing AI increasingly embedded into the employee experience. What lessons from the First Tech merger apply to the AI transformation happening inside financial institutions today?
The boardroom question has changed. It’s no longer “What are you doing about AI?” That’s a given. The questions now are: Where’s the value? Where’s the growth? Where are the savings? And are we moving fast enough?
The instinct is often to answer that pressure with more technology: another model, another agent, another tool. But creating value doesn’t start with another piece of technology. It starts with people. AI only delivers a return when employees understand why it exists, trust what it tells them, and use it in their daily work. And AI that can’t be deployed securely and governed properly simply won’t scale, which matters enormously in a regulated industry like financial services.
That’s where the First Tech merger is instructive. Reaching 100% adoption came from giving employees one trusted, relevant place to go. Financial institutions that build that foundation, with governed content, the right permissions, and a single front door to information, applications, and AI-powered experiences, will be the ones that can show their boards measurable value, not just more activity.
First Tech’s communications team was relatively lean despite supporting thousands of employees. What does this tell us about the role technology should play in helping financial institutions scale?
The answer isn’t necessarily to build a bigger communications organization. It’s to give existing teams better infrastructure.
First Tech’s communications team needed to reach thousands of employees across a large geographic footprint without overwhelming people with irrelevant information. Personalization, targeting, and centralized publishing gave a relatively lean team the reach and precision of a much larger operation.
That is particularly relevant for financial services, where organizations are simultaneously dealing with growth, regulatory change, M&A, and technology transformation. The communications function needs to scale with the business, and technology can provide that leverage.
Looking beyond First Tech, what do you think financial institutions most often get wrong about employee experience and what should they be doing differently?
The biggest mistake is treating employee experience as a collection of tools rather than an ecosystem. Organizations can have excellent individual applications and still create a frustrating employee experience if people have to navigate disconnected systems to get their work done.
The opportunity now is to create a much more unified experience around the employee, one that connects people, information, applications, and increasingly AI.
For financial institutions, this isn’t just about making employees happier. It’s about helping employees move from information to action. When people can find trusted information quickly, understand what’s expected of them and move between the tools they need without friction, the entire organization becomes more capable of adapting.
The First Tech experience demonstrates that clearly: when you give people a digital environment that is relevant, useful, and easy to engage with, technology stops being another source of complexity and becomes an engine for change.
