Banking

Bank-owned check archiver Viewpointe gets ready for post-check world

Viewpointe was established by huge banks in 2000 to do something: shop digital pictures of checks.

The require ended up being clear when the physical transport of checks momentarily ground to a stop after 9/11, and later on when legislation referred to as Check 21 let banks manage more checks digitally.

Check archiving volumes are still high today, however they’re on a progressive decrease.

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The Charlotte, North Carolina, business — which is owned by Bank of America, Truist Financial, U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo and IBM — still loads more than 10 billion images each year to its archive. Checks are its biggest organization. But the kind of information it holds has actually broadened gradually to consist of files, messages, e-mails and declarations associating with accounts, loans, lockbox services and cleaning and settlements.

“Right now, we are managing well over 100 billion digitized documents,” stated Tim Coff, president and CEO of Viewpointe. 

But the business, like its bank customers, understands it requires to improve and supply services beyond imaging checks and other files. To continue this growth, it is moving to a public cloud.

“It’s a legacy service around the check space, and it’s indicative of where a lot of banking heritage systems are today from an application perspective,” stated Steven Dickens, senior expert at Futurum Research, a research study and advisory company that concentrates on digital development. “Most large and even medium-to-large organizations that have been around the banking sector more than 10 or 15 years are facing the same challenge: legacy applications that need to be modernized to adapt to competitive and end-user demands.”

In December, Viewpointe and its long time partner, the information-technology facilities companies Kyndryl, revealed that they were collaborating to move Viewpointe’s conventional facilities to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Transitioning mission-critical applications from a personal cloud to a public cloud is something numerous banks still be reluctant to do, since of issues about strength and cybersecurity.

Dickens stated Viewpointe and Kyndryl’s procedure is a lot more transformational than “a lift and shift, ‘let’s pick up this old mess and put it on some different infrastructure.’”

Instead, says Matt Milton, Kyndryl’s U.S. president, it’s a “full-stack modernization” of Viewpointe’s IT facilities and operations, or updates to Viewpointe’s hardware, middleware and applications to end up being cloud-native on Microsoft Azure. He states it is a needed modification so Viewpointe can broaden its services. Legacy facilities might likewise be at danger of security attacks.

In the future, Viewpointe prepares to present brand-new material services, such as permitting safe information sharing throughout various banks.

The 2 business selected Azure since they felt it was the most safe and durable of the cloud suppliers for extremely controlled material. Viewpointe’s familiarity with Microsoft 365 was another plus.

“When you start to build solutions for each content type, before you know it there are multiple silos and archives,” stated Coff. “We’ve been running on a secure platform for 20 years, but like every other company, we had to look at our own technology and say, it is serving us well today, but what do we need for tomorrow?”

Coff stated that transitioning from a personal cloud to a public cloud took some getting utilized do, however that Azure will supply the exact same, if not much better, security and dependability at a much better cost point.

“It’s taken time for the industry to become more comfortable with the security and privacy technologies that can be wrapped around the Azure environment,” he stated. “You are going to see more and more of it as the public cloud becomes more mainstream for the financial services industry.”

Viewpointe has more than 15 customers, including its initial bank owners, other banks, Fiserv and the Federal Reserve. Kyndryl drew out from IBM in November and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Although the requirement for this endeavor preceded the pandemic, the pandemic was a driver for modification, comparable to how specific occasions stimulated Viewpointe’s starting twenty years earlier.

“The pandemic has pushed more folks to adopt a digital means of doing business,” stated Coff. “It’s putting more pressure on legacy systems.”

He includes that Viewpointe’s advancement is a natural development of what it was produced to do.

“If Viewpointe can help solve these challenges related to the complexity of managing digital content, those banks can focus on what is most important to them, which is serving the customers and communities they operate in,” he stated.



Gabriel

A news media journalist always on the go, I've been published in major publications including VICE, The Atlantic, and TIME.

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