IBS Journal March 2015


‘We were searching for a partner who we believed would


have our best interests in mind.’ Donnie Price, Four Points FCU


the venture as a ‘monumental initiative’ and its ‘biggest technology advancement’ over the last 30 years. In the credit union space, Fiserv


fought off competition from Symitar (a subsidiary of Jack Henry) with its Episys core system and D+H with PhoenixEFE to keep its existing client, Neighbors Federal Credit Union. The credit union is replacing Fiserv’s Cube, that has been in place since 1997, with DNA (this system stems from Open Solutions that Fiserv acquired a couple of years ago). Kathie Gill, president and CEO at Neighbors FCU, told IBS that in-depth reference checks, site visits and meetings with key Fiserv staff were carried out before the decision was made. However, D+H did snatch a customer


of Fiserv, Nebraska-based Four Points Federal Credit Union, which signed for D+H’s Ultradata core system to replace Spectrum. Spectrum was in place for 15 years at the credit union, and Donnie Price, president and CEO of Four Points FCU, told IBS that it ‘has not kept up with the times’. Five vendors were evaluated (Fiserv and Symitar among them). ‘We were searching for a partner who we believed would have our best interests in mind,’ Price commented. American Savings Bank, a community


bank in Ohio, took D+H’s PhoenixEFE core system to replace Insight, a white-labelled version of Fiserv’s DNA, supplied by COCC. The bank’s CEO, Jack Kuntz, cited the ‘quality and integrity’ of the staff and senior management at D+H as one of the key factors in their decision. Fiserv, CSI and


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Smiley Technology were also evaluated as well as the incumbent provider. For Jack Henry, 2014 brought a


contract with Christian Community Credit Union in California, for the Episys core system. This credit union was once set to be the pioneer of the now defunct Acumen core system from Fiserv. However, as Fiserv took over Open Solutions and its DNA platform in 2013, it killed off the Acumen development, forcing the users to either convert to DNA or look elsewhere. There were more than just disgruntled noises about this, with one customer, Wildfire Credit Union, taking Fiserv to court over the alleged unfulfilled claims and promises made by the vendor. Wildfire was originally interested in replacing its legacy Symitar core system with Acumen, but had to settle for DNA as a processing engine, with Acumen’s front-end (as Fiserv promised to keep the development of this part of the system). In its court filing, Wildfire stressed the importance of having the latter component: ‘Acumen UI was very clean and elegant looking, while from the beginning DNA UI looked convoluted and confusing’, adding that it would not have been interested in DNA otherwise. However, the Acumen front-end did not materialise and neither did a promised referral feature in DNA that was supposed to be ‘better than Symitar’, according to Wildfire. The credit union was also dissatis- fied with the project team that the vendor supplied, and having reached the end of its tether, it terminated the contract and asked Fiserv for a refund. Fiserv refused


© IBS Intelligence 2015 www.ibsintelligence.com


and Wildfire went to court in late 2014. Meanwhile, Merchants Bank, a


community bank in Vermont with $1.7 billion in assets, migrated to Jack Henry’s Silverlake core banking solution, ousting Fiserv’s Signature that it had been using for 23 years. Zoe Erdman, SVP and senior operations officer at Merchants Bank, said that the bank needed an ‘easy to use’ sys- tem and a set-up that had ‘as many appli- cations as possible belonging to the same supplier’, plus a vendor that could offer a ‘robust data centre and disaster recovery’. The bank’s shortlist was conventional: FIS, D+H, Fiserv and Jack Henry. For FIS, there was Yadkin Bank, a $4


billion regional bank in North and South Carolina, that went through a technology standardisation project as part of its merger with another domestic bank, VantageSouth Bank. VantageSouth was a long-standing user of FIS’s Integrated Banking System (IBS) and a decision was taken to stay with FIS once the two banks were unified. Incidentally, FIS has been making


progress of late with its plans to grad- ually renew its wide range of financial services applications, starting with the IBS product. It has recently introduced an initial component into its US bureau business, cutting over with the customer management element in one large data centre. This is for the service underpinned by IBS, FIS’s platform for mid- to upper-tier domestic banks. Next on the agenda for this is the Profile core system, which FIS sells both in the US and internationally.


ibs sales league table 2015


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