Technology Advisory and IT Consulting Services

Many banks and credit unions grapple with misaligned IT strategies, escalating IT costs, underutilized applications, siloed operations, and mounting technology risks, all while facing relentless pressure to modernize technology, enhance efficiency, and demonstrate tangible value to the business.

Cornerstone’s comprehensive assessment of the tech stack and technology governance, using a People, Process, and Technology model, addresses key pain points by driving effective technology alignment with business strategy. The assessment recommendations focus on enhancing the application portfolio and integration capabilities, identifying cost-saving opportunities, strengthening IT governance and organization, ensuring stable IT operations and services, and improving technology risk management functions.

Our technology assessment uncovers gaps, inefficiencies, and opportunities that form the foundation of a robust Strategic Technology Plan (STP). An actionable roadmap translates findings into clear priorities and timelines, ensuring your technology investments are aligned with your business objectives and positioned to drive measurable success.

A defined Strategic Technology Plan (STP) helps align business and IT strategies while prioritizing investments and initiatives to support long-term growth.

At Cornerstone, we help financial institutions assess, refine, or develop Strategic Technology Plans to be comprehensive, actionable, and aligned with your unique needs. Whether you’re evaluating your current STP or preparing for a refresh, our expertise ensures your technology investments remain a powerful driver of growth, innovation, and efficiency.

By balancing industry trends and evolving business needs, we help your institution maintain future readiness, ensuring your technology strategy remains relevant and adaptable in a rapidly changing landscape.

In today’s fast-paced environment, CIOs and IT leaders often face critical challenges such as ensuring the IT team focuses on high-value activities, allocating resources efficiently, and maintaining governance processes that align with strategic priorities.

Cornerstone's approach to this assessment focuses on project prioritization processes, application ownership, effectiveness of governance committees, investment decision-making, and project portfolio value realization. Our recommendations streamline resource allocation and align work efforts with organizational priorities to help maximize the value of IT investments. Additionally, we enhance traditional SDLC and Agile portfolio and program management processes, ensuring they adhere to industry best practices to deliver value-added outcomes and prioritize high-impact projects.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure! For many financial institutions, understanding how their technology spending and staffing levels compare to peers is critical for justifying investments, driving operational efficiency, and improving internal service level agreements (SLAs).

Leveraging Cornerstone's Performance Vault proprietary database, we can compare your IT spending and staffing, with peer banks or credit unions of similar size, business models and tech stacks.

Our Technology Spending and Staffing Peer Benchmarking service offers insights into your organization’s IT investments and workforce, helping you identify gaps, opportunities, and trends that guide data-driven decision-making.

When internal resources are stretched thin, and the organization’s IT strategy demands scalability, agility, and specialized expertise, engaging an outsourced managed services provider (MSP or MSSP) becomes a practical solution. Selecting the right Managed Services Provider (MSP) is critical for financial institutions looking to optimize IT operations, enhance scalability, and ensure reliable support for their technology needs. However, the process can be complex and time-consuming, with high stakes for operational efficiency and business continuity.

Our Managed Services Provider Selection service streamlines this process, providing financial institutions with a structured approach to evaluating, comparing, and selecting MSPs that align with their unique business goals, technology requirements, and compliance needs. We work closely with your team to define selection criteria, assess vendor capabilities, and ensure the provider can deliver the necessary infrastructure, support, and strategic value.