IBS Journal November 2015
New-generation core banking system launched in the US
Also, having just one or two large
banks as customers makes the vendor too dependent on them, observes Lopatine. ‘The value of the company, in my opinion, is higher if it has hundreds of small FIs as clients rather than just two large ones.’ The first client was a community bank
in Florida, says Lopatine. The bank original- ly was interested in a new CRM/front-end solution, but discovered that it would be too expensive and cumbersome to inte- grate with its existing mainframe core. It turned out to be a much better deal to replace the entire front-to-back office set- up altogether, he adds. This client is set to go live in mid-2016.
By the end of that year, all current takers are set to be live on Smartcore.
Old vs new ‘Old core systems out there in the US today are about batch processing,’ Lopatine says. ‘Imagine the publishing industry working the same way – imagine US Today not be- ing able to sell, process and post an online advert here and now – that just would never happen, it is simply unimaginable. ‘I used to work in banking as well as
retail sectors, so I am not just a tech guy, and I look at everything from three perspectives. ‘So when we looked at our CMS plat-
form for publishers, we realised that we have a “bank in a box”. The platform has the workflow tools, sophisticated integra- tion tools, relational database and CMS.’ It was decided to spin off the platform
into a separate business, and this is how Nymbus was born. The project kicked off in early 2014.
The proposition • •
‘Held hostage’ ‘Community banks and credit unions in the US are being held hostage by the big four core processors,’ Lopatine states. Old generation technology, lack of innovation, high costs and the necessity to maintain big IT teams – this is what manyfinancial institutionshave to deal with, he claims. He compares a mainframe solution to
a 1970s car. ‘Is a 1970s car more robust? It has more spare parts, more metal, but it does not make it more robust! It has no airbags or seatbelts, it is clunky, it has no touchscreen radio and so on.’ Nymbus, he adds, wants to be ‘the Tes-
la of banking’.
A new hope Changes in old systems require coding, which can be expensive, time and resource consuming, he says. New generation soft- ware, meanwhile, is all about configuration, not coding. Products, APIs and reports can be ‘created on the fly’. ‘We are the first full stack API driven
platform,’ Lopatine says. The system is HTML5, browser-based. There are no lega- cy components, and it is built in Java. The system is supplied on a fully hosted
basis. The company has two data centres in the US and one in Europe. The system supports front-to-back
office operations and is supplied as one package, ‘defined by functions’. There is no separate teller, business intelligence (BI), online or other subsystems, Lopa- tine explains. He feels that smaller entities would benefit from an end-to-end solution that will take care of all their needs, from
as we offer paperless processes, no need for servers and bit IT teams.’
Fully hosted. A private cloud, sin- gle-tenant environment.
Unlimited storage for documents and images.
• No deposits, cost-effective. ‘We do not want to be very cheap because we of- fer so much more,’ states Lopatine. ‘But we are not more expensive than the others. In the long run, we are cheaper
• Assistance with digital marketing and a new website. ‘Many community banks and credit unions still don’t have a website or have a very old one, yet a website today is a major selling channel,’ Lopatine observes.
•
Fast time-to-market for new products. Configuring new products and reports in-house (there is a widget for this, so
...continued from front page
Smartcore functionality • •
• ACH/wires •
bill payments
• document management (built in) • CRM features (built in) •
• •
single sign-on, hence no switching between different applications checking overdrafts
reporting (management, regulatory etc) tool for visual reports (e.g. pie charts)
processing at the back-end to user- and customer-facing functions at the front-end. ‘Our aim is to empower smaller credit
unions and community banks to compete with large mega banks,’ he states.
What’s to come An audit by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), a US government interagency body that includes five banking regulators, will be done in early 2016. Loan origination functionality, which
is currently in the development phase, will be available by mid-2016. Nymbus will complete its acquisition
of a small core banking software devel- oper and its clients will be converted to Smartcore. By the end of 2017, Nymbus aims to
have 50 customers converted to Smartcore.
a customer might not need to involve Nymbus at all).
• Annual subscription, which includes a certain number of support hours per year.
• 24x7 concierge services for customers. • Regular upgrades. •
Easy to scale up.
• No lengthy training. ‘The system is intuitive,’ says Lopatine. ‘All you need to know is banking.’
Tanya Andreasyan
client onboarding and transaction processing (accounts, deposits, loans) integration
22
© IBS Intelligence 2015
www.ibsintelligence.com
us round-up
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