By Evan Sparks
How flexible is your core?
No, we’re not asking about your health or your yoga skills. The question gets to the heart of a bank: its core provider and how it supports a bank’s ability to innovate.
Bankers may sometimes think their core choices are limited to sticking with whatever they have, or going through a costly and disruptive conversion. While either of those are valid, members of ABA’s Core Platforms Committee have more choices—and they start by understanding how flexible your core might be.
For example, D.J. Seeterlin—chief strategy and innovation officer at Chesapeake Bank in Kilmarnock, Virginia—did a deep analysis of his core and found that it offers “developer portals” that “allow us to do the things that we do to innovate around the edges.”
There’s a wide range of flexibility among the core providers and the platforms they offer, Seeterlin adds, with some allowing API access with open flow of data, while others charge toll fees and licenses.
Some banks use middleware solutions to expand the flexibility of their cores. Santa Cruz County Bank in California looked into middleware to avoid the time and costs of conversion while also becoming less reliant on its core for innovation. “We started de-converting one product at a time” starting with online banking, says Jaime Manriquez, CIO and CISO at the bank.
“There’s value—there always will be with a core provider,” says Trey Maust, executive chairman at Lewis and Clark Bank in Oregon City, Oregon, and vice chair of the Core Platforms Committee. But the more flexible your core is, the easier it will be to “work around the edges.”
During a presentation at the ABA Conference for Community Bankers in San Antonio on Feb. 13, Maust unveiled the committee’s latest resource: a Core Provider Flexibility Assessment. It’s a self-evaluation that a bankers can conduct to evaluate his or her own bank’s approach to innovation and the level of flexibility and partnership they can anticipate from the core—and a starting point for future plans.
