nCino Acquires Sandbox Banking to Fuel Banks’ Digital Transformation

Banking solutions provider nCino has acquired Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) company Sandbox Banking.

The deal, announced Tuesday (Feb. 11), is designed to bolster nCino’s ability to improve data connectivity and streamline operations for banks and credit unions.

“Financial institutions frequently build new connections to support emerging products, user workflows, or external systems, but digital transformation is often slowed by time-consuming and costly integration challenges,” nCino said in a news release.

“By leveraging Sandbox Banking’s technology, nCino will offer an integration hub to help financial institutions simplify these projects, eliminate redundancies, and seamlessly align data across core and ancillary banking systems, thereby driving key process improvements and accelerating the speed at which projects are implemented and live.”

This approach, the release added, allows financial institutions to quickly provide customers with omnichannel experience while providing efficient, secure and cost-effective system interoperability with no technical bottlenecks.

Chris Gufford, nCino’s chief product officer, said the acquisition followed several years of collaboration between his company and Sandbox Banking.

“Banks and credit unions face critical demands for operational efficiency and regulatory compliance,” Gufford said.

“This acquisition gives nCino a better ability to empower these institutions with a flexible, reliable data environment for greater agility to quickly integrate third party systems, AI and new technologies without disruptions.”

The deal follows nCino’s purchase last year of FullCircl, a move the company said would enhance its onboarding capabilities for financial institutions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and strengthen its client-bank’s compliance processes.

Writing about the digitization trend in banking last year, PYMNTS noted a growing preference among consumers for using digital channels to carry out financial transactions. This, that report said, has led financial institutions (FIs), legacy banks in particular, to innovate and offer solutions to meet this need.

James Butland, vice president of payments and U.K. managing director at Mangopay, discussed this growing trend in an interview with PYMNTS, and stressed the challenges faced by traditional banks because of their legacy infrastructure and technology.

“The challenge that a traditional bank has, is that they sit on 150, 200 years of legacy infrastructure and probably 60 years of legacy technology. So, banks have found it difficult to innovate quickly,” Butland said. He noted, however, that change is ongoing as “banks are starting to realize the speed at which technology has changed the world.”