Taking On Legacy Banking Systems Via The Cloud

In an age where financial technology aims to reinvent the way that consumers interact with banks, it makes sense that some companies should consider it their goal to reinvent the way mid-sized banks compete with their larger brethren, chiefly through technology.

Enter NYMBUS, a software-focused tech outfit that offers both applications and cloud-based infrastructure to smaller players in the financial industry with assets of $10 billion or less on the books.

The company launched its core banking software application in the fall of 2015, with the assertion that it offers the only end-to-end, full-stack banking platform in the industry. More recently, as spotlighted in PYMNTS’ virtual pages, NYMBUS struck a deal with Geezeo, a personal finance management provider, to expand into budgeting and cash flow management functions.

In an interview with PYMNTS, NYMBUS Chief Executive Officer Alex Lopatine said that the competition between his firm and the biggest players in the banking industry can be likened to the movement of the Rebel forces in “Star Wars” against the powerful, entrenched Empire; in this case, said the executive, the entrenched incumbents are the firms that he said “are too big to fail” and are served by FIS and its peers.

But, as a result, said Lopatine, legacy systems in place have “created complexity across enterprises” and a cobbled-together, patchwork group of systems spanning functions and parts of the stack that trace their genesis not across months or years but decades.

And even against software and tech initiatives that span lengthy periods and come at considerable expense, cautioned Lopatine, there’s no guarantee that “five years and $200 million” he offered as a hypothetical situation of a bank building upon legacy systems will work. “They’ve never been holistic,” he said of big banks and the big software firms that serve them, “with 20 applications and with still a mainframe core.” The trend — one that will get additional educational thrust at the Innovator’s Expo later this month — “is toward one where there is one product and everything the bank needs in the cloud.”

Operating off one flexible platform, he continued, “means that data is actionable, finally, and makes sense faster.” Speed to deployment, he said, is especially timely as bankers must navigate, simply, a browser and need not work within the confines, say, of Windows or other legacy programs.