In providing financial services, smaller FIs have to navigate decades-old legacy systems to get up to speed, and the NYMBUS mission is to do just that. CEO Alex Lopatine explains how a partnership with Geezeo is the latest salvo in helping these players compete against the big banks.
Cloud computing, say its proponents, has several advantages over hardware-based systems. Flexibility of the technology is one selling point; updates can be managed remotely and instantly, information can be shared over multiple locations in real time and costs are lower.
To that end, NYMBUS, a core banking software company based in Florida, has partnered with Geezeo, a white-label personal finance management solutions provider that caters to banks and credit unions.
The announcement of the relationship between the two companies came at the end of last week, and the personal finance tools center on, among other things, business and consumer wealth management tracking. Through the combined efforts of both companies, FIs will be able to offer branded, customized personal finance tools to end users, and Geezeo already has a roster of 400 credit unions and banks in place.
The newest partnership represents, for NYMBUS, the latest salvo in a mission that has the young tech company aiming squarely at competing with big banks.
In an interview with PYMNTS, Alex Lopatine, president and co-chief executive officer of NYMBUS, said that the link with Geezeo is a natural extension of his firm’s “bank-in-a-box” solution that brings “full-stack” functionality to processes that span the front-, middle- and back-end processes of FIs that are grappling with legacy systems that have been cobbled together from decades of hardware and coding. “There are systems in place from the 70s, from the 80s and the 90s,” he told PYMNTS, “and it’s hard to operate with systems that were from the last century.”
With that hodgepodge of technology in place, said the executive, efficiency is hardly easy to come by. Changing business processes often means having to start with hard coding and working across the several vendors that have supplied the building blocks across different processes. In fact, real overhauls can last several years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars and, even then, can come up short on what they promise to deliver.
With NYMBUS, said Lopatine, Software-as-a-Service allows for some B2B activity that includes B2B payments and account-to-account transfers (which were a focus of the relationship announced at the end of the last year with Payveris), but now, support provided to FIs (itself a B2B relationship of sorts) can move beyond legacy platforms — “across all of a FI’s clients or not” — with an ease of use that is intuitive to the people within the FI that are introducing the personal finance tools to consumers. That dovetails well, said the CEO, with what he called the “sweet spot” of the NYMBUS clientele, typically FIs with less than $10 billion in assets and those seeking more of a presence in mobile banking. As such, Lopatine said, borrowing imagery from a film franchise with which you may be just a bit familiar, NYMBUS operates with the mindset of a “Rebel Alliance” that fights against the “dark forces and the evil Empire” of tech vendors, such as Fiserv, FIS, Jack Henry and D+H.
With cloud offerings, noted Lopatine, bringing financial services into end markets is streamlined precisely because the businesses bringing those services to fruition have an easier time working across browser-based processes, and upgrading, customizing or having access to huge amounts of well-analyzed data is a strong competitive advantage.