Acquisition by FIS
The acquisition of Sanchez itself came in early 2004 and subsequently saw Profile housed with other back office systems, including those that had arrived with the acquisition of Alltel the previous year. Clearly, FIS has a large number of back office systems, many of which have arrived through acquisitions. It has, however, strived to maintain a clear branding and positioning for the likes of Profile. By early 2006, a new strategy had been outlined which included this level of commitment to all of its core systems, keeping each as a strategic product. However, it also added a middle layer which allowed them to interoperate and formed the platform for a number of new components that could be shared by the various applications. The middle layer was the aforementioned Sanchez- derived Xpress. It had started in 1998 as an integration and aggregation engine to link Sanchez’s own products to those of third parties. It would now support multiple delivery channels and included an XML gateway and load balancing facilities. It was intended to handle customer authentication and security, and provide facilities for customer-centric alerts, account aggregation services and customer correspondence management. Xpress (or XES as it was now dubbed) would now not only provide the front- end layer for Profile but for a number of other FIS systems as well. The company’s future plans included the extraction of common functions from the core banking engines and the population of the Java middle layer with generic components to be used across different platforms. In terms of positioning its myriad systems, FIS has described Profile as the top tier real-time open system for Unix and Linux, Systematics as the batch mainframe option. There is another system, Corebank, which had Danish roots and was described as the mainframe real-time alternative but this has had little or no traction in recent years. Although all continue
Uptake
Despite the corporate twists and turns, sales success for Profile has generally been maintained while under the helm of FIS, in the US and beyond. Its two new-name signings in its US stronghold for 2005 comprised NetBank (the bank was closed two years later) and E*Trade. 2007 was something of a bumper year for Profile, with eight new-name wins in total. This included the signing in April of Wal-Mart de México Bank, a Mexico- based subsidiary of the US retail giant. There were four new customers for Profile in 2009, including Scottrade, a discount online trading firm which had plans to offer retail
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to be marketed, FIS said it was moving towards a single development organisation and sales-force. Also in 2009, FIS announced that Profile would finally be available on the IBM z-Series, having promised this on and off for a number of years. The main purpose of this move was to offer an upgrade path to banks already on the mainframe technology. Software development for this was completed by the end of 2008; IBM lent some resources to modify its operating system. A single configuration, single database version of the system was benchmarked by FIS covering at least 100 million accounts with over 3000 transactions per second and 100 million batch transactions per second, all with less than one-tenth of a second response time. Both FIS and IBM started promoting this option as available on a global basis with a focus on the top 750 banks.
FIS claims an embedded customer information file
(CIF) and centralised customer overview for Profile, plus a modular product factory comprising configurable, pre- built components. There is also a rules engine for product customisation, plus product and service bundling support. It supports deposit account servicing including current and check accounts, certificates of deposit, notice accounts, segmented investments, investment sweeps, tax efficient savings, health savings accounts, passbook accounts, budget and scheduled savings initiative support, overdraft management and dormancy processing. There is also support for loan account servicing including retail and commercial loans, mortgages, secured and unsecured credit products, revolving credit facilities, collateral management, sold/ purchased and syndicated loan processing, delinquency and non-performing loans management and reporting. There is transaction support including teller processing, payments and collections including credit transfers, direct debits and ATM/EFT links. Accounting/financial management including general ledger, cost center accounting, nostro and vostro accounting, accounts payable, fixed assets, and budgeting.
banking. There were three core system deals in 2010 for Profile. One was in the US, at TIAA-CREF (it specialises in retirement financial services for people in the academic, research, medical and cultural fields); another was in Thailand, at Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC); and the third was a lending win in India. 2011 brought four wins for Profile, including one in Thailand, following in the footsteps of BAAC. The rest were US-based.
US Financial Services Technology Market Report |
www.ibsintelligence.com
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