Deluxe’s First Factory
TRENDING TECHNOLOGY
DELUXE: A TRANSFORMATION FOR THE AGES! TURNING A 100-YEAR-OLD LEGACY CHECK PRINTER INTO A DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY POWERHOUSE. By. Mike Mathews
MIKE MATHEWS IS THE SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER AT DELUXE, A ROLE HE HAS HELD SINCE MAY 2013. AS THE 2019 TWIN CITIES CIO OF THE YEAR GLOBAL ORBIE WINNER, MIKE’S APPLIED USE OF TECHNOLOGY ENRICHES THE LIVES OF DELUXE CUSTOMERS AND EMPLOYEES. HERE HE SHARES HIS STORY OF TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION.
MITIGATE RISK WITH TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENT
When the world changed in March of 2020, I found myself again turning to technology to solve a problem I never thought our company would face. In 1915, W.R. Hotchkiss, founder of Deluxe, invented the checkbook, a product that fundamentally changed commerce and the payment landscape. Over the next 105 years, Deluxe remained a leader in the check and business form printing space, evolving and innovating alongside our customers to grow into a $2 billion publicly-traded company. Our innovation included expansion into web hosting and development, payroll services, business incorporation, payment processing, promotional products, cloud services, and so much more. When COVID-19 impacted the world, Deluxe experienced one of our most profitable quarters to date and signed four of the top ten deals in our company’s history. With more than 4.5 million small business customers and over 4,000 financial institution customers, we felt poised for even greater growth.
To keep up with our growth trajectory, we improved our inbound call centers and acquired payment processing companies around the US and Canada. With 6,500 employees in more than 80 locations, we were a very office-based and physical plant-located company. However, when we needed to keep our staff safe and send people to work from home, our investment in technology paid off. Within three-and-a-half weeks, we moved more than 1,100 workers previously designed to be in an office setting to work from home. We improved our server capacity and invested in secure systems to ensure we kept our client data safe. We instituted virtual training and, thanks to an earlier investment in Microsoft Teams, we had the bandwidth and capacity to conduct business as usual across our company. Now, as the economy begins to slowly rebound, more than two- thirds of our workforce can work from home, creating social distance space for our team members still at essential sites.
06 | Trending Technology
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