The world of banking is hotly competitive, and nowhere is this more so than credit unions, co-operative banks, and smaller banks.
Even worse, these institutions don’t always have the muscle to invest in IT infrastructure that offers completive advantage. One cloud provider, Infrasoft, is answering that need with a new generation of core banking services (CBS) aimed at these smaller financial institutions.
Infrasoft already supports over 130 core banking installs, spread over some 3,000 sites.
“The solution helps the financial institutions to modernize their operations in a phased manner. Its enterprise-class modules are expected to enhance the overall efficiency of the institution thereby improving customers' experience across all channels,” the company said. “Infrasoft’s unique cloud platform enables processes that can be accessed at a central remote location. It significantly reduces the investment cost of setting up additional branches, helps reduce infrastructure and maintenance costs.”
So what is core banking? According to Gartner, it is “a back-end system that processes daily banking transactions, and posts updates to accounts and other financial records. Core banking systems typically include deposit, loan and credit-processing capabilities, with interfaces to general ledger systems and reporting tools.”
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The company’s core banking solution is called OMNIEnterprise and is built to help small banks launch new services, a must in this topsy-turvy financial world. The tool supports most forms of liabilities and assets, and comes as an integrated process and data solution, the company said. “OMNIEnterprise functional framework blends the Core Front-Office, Mid-Office, Back-Office and Treasury and is well suited to needs of banking enterprises from the perspective of functionality, architecture, deployment as well as maintenance,” the company said.
Infrasoft has made Gartner’s Core Banking Magic Quadrant for four years running.
“InfrasoftTech’s OMNIEnterprise was launched in 2003, and its primary markets are South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries and Africa, with close to 90 core banking clients. OMNIEnterprise runs over Windows, Unix and Linux, on Oracle, DB2, SQL Server and MySQL databases,” Gartner said, adding that “OMNIEnterprise reference clients rated the implementation and ongoing customer support highly.”
CBS in the Cloud (and Elsewhere)
While Infrasoft believes CBS is ideal for the cloud, it supports multiple models. Hanuman Tripathi, Founder & Group Managing Director at Infrasoft Technologies, believes, however, that small banks should look first at the cloud, a point Tripathi made at a Frost & Sullivan IT banking event.
“Cloud-based CBS packages address the very issues that smaller banks grapple with when it comes to transformational projects such as core banking. Cost and lack of resources are often the two biggest pain points for them,” Tripathi said. “However, with a cloud solution both these barriers can be overcome easily, since here users don’t need to purchase fresh hardware, design systems or hire additional IT staff to run the CBS. They also don’t have to worry about support or application upgrades, since all of these are provided to them as a part of the subscription bundle.”
Today most OMNIEnterprise Core Banking customers use an on-premises model, but more and more are taking advantage of hosted approaches.
Edited by
Rory J. Thompson
