Profile FIS
Profile is a key offering of FIS, at home and abroad. It came in early 2004 with the acquisition of long-standing US core banking system supplier, Sanchez. It is a broad retail offering. It is not one of the newest as it started out in the early 1980s on DEC VMS and was written in the Mumps language. However, the system had been significantly broadened down the years and, prior to its acquisition, had always resided within a focused, one product company, which both developed and acquired other applications which added value around the core. Profile is now positioned by FIS as its top tier real-time open system for Unix and Linux, and it has continued to sell in relatively healthy numbers to this day.
Origins
Sanchez Computer Associates was set up by two brothers in 1979 and successfully moved out from its domestic roots at an early stage, initially working with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC, now defunct) and then with a wider number of partners, including IBM. It also worked with local companies in overseas markets. It sometimes gained clutches of users in a particular market. Poland was one example. A Unix version was added in the mid-1990s.
Sanchez had an ASP-based subsidiary – e-Profile – which was formed out of ArTech Financial Services, a Pennsylvania- based service bureau acquired by Sanchez in early 1999. Key internet-related takers included Citibank, with its Citi f/i offshoot, Wingspan, and ING Direct. A planned flotation of e-Profile in 2000 was postponed and there were reverses along the way, with the success or otherwise of e-Profile tied to the internet banks which it was supporting. Some succeeded, some did not, but the overall volumes through e-Profile increased and by early 2002 the entity was profitable. Indeed, more than virtually anyone else in the back office space at the time, Sanchez succeeded with this ASP model of delivery for early internet banks.
In 2000, Sanchez launched a spate of new products. These included a securities offering plus a transactional middleware component, with the latter being used as the basis for applications covering internet banking, call center
management and teller support. The use of Java for the new components meant that they were platform and database- independent. The middleware layer was called Xpress and is now being used across the FIS product set (see below). In mid-2001, the supplier announced a long-overdue
migration of Profile onto the mainframe. This was initially achieved by porting a Linux version of the system, so did not use the native MVS environment, but a fully-blown migration followed. On the IBM eServer z900 Enterprise Server, benchmarks apparently showed initial accrual processing throughput of 5841 accounts per second on a ten million account database. The system was traditionally based on the Mumps-derived GT.M database but, in early 2002, Sanchez announced that it was working on DB2 and Oracle versions of Profile.
Sanchez made additional acquisitions. In early 2002, it
acquired Equidity Inc, a Virginia-based online origination software supplier. The Equidity solutions were integrated into
Sanchez’s WebClient front-end, WebCSR customer
servicing application, and Xpress customer and transaction management offering. A few months later, Sanchez acquired Canadian wealth management solution specialist Spectra Securities Software. The aim behind the purchase was to broaden Sanchez’s product range and to move into the brokerage and insurance markets. Spectra’s Wealthware applications also became part of Sanchez’s WebClient software.
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