Financial services software provider Finastra onboarded 25 clients onto its cloud-based core banking solution, Fusion Phoenix, during the 2021 fiscal year.

The London-based Finastra’s new client institutions include a mix of banks and credit unions such as the Iowa-based Peoples Credit Union, First National Bank of Manchester in Kentucky, and Colorado-based Fowler State Bank. The Fusion Phoenix cloud-based solution runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud, allowing banks and credit unions to easily integrate with new platforms via an open API architecture. APIs are essentially software gateways that allow two distinct programs to communicate with each other.

“Overall, it took our clients five days to basically migrate to Microsoft Azure,” Milind Pathak, senior director of core banking platforms at Finastra, told Bank Automation News. The batch of clients follows a group of 21 migrations Finastra completed last year and is indicative of a larger trend in which financial institutions are moving to the cloud for the flexibility it offers. Finastra counts financial institutions such as Seattle Bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Silvergate Bank and investment bank Natixis among its clients. The firm registers $1.9 billion in annual revenues and has over 8,600 customers worldwide, according to the company’s website.

The cloud solution also offers connectivity to a suite of Finastra’s solutions for digital enablement, lending, mortgage, payments, as well as the ability to link with FusionFabric.cloud, an open developer platform that provides access to an ecosystem of apps financial institutions can deploy.

FIs “are realizing that an open, cloud-based core has the ability to actually facilitate innovation and eliminate the roadblocks and inefficiencies caused by lack of integration with other technology solutions,” Stephen Greer, an analyst at research firm Celent, told BAN.

The $49.7 million Peoples Credit Union, based in Iowa, was looking for that flexibility in a core provider.

“We needed a core that could provide a foundation for innovation and scalability” Jordan Hensley, chief executive at Peoples Credit Union, said in a statement. “With Fusion Phoenix, we are confident it will serve our current needs and grow with us for years to come,” he added.

Finastra chose to go with Microsoft’s cloud offering because community banks and credit unions tend to be concerned about how their data is going to be used. “What we like about Microsoft is that it keeps this independence of the cloud platform they have and other side of Microsoft,” Finastra’s Pathak said, adding that while Google and Amazon may offer the same thing, they’re also “known for using data to launch other services.”

While Finastra is focused on helping banks and credit unions upgrade their tech stacks, Pathak said that the company is also positioning itself for big tech’s foray into financial services. “Two out of six community financial institutions that Google has partnered with for bringing Google flex banking are Finastra Fusion Phoenix customers,” he said.

Pathak added that Finastra has also paid specific attention to building process automation onto its core banking platform, with the data gathered by the firm showing a saving upwards of 700 to 800 person-days per year. While he wouldn’t specify which clients are in Finastra’s pipeline, he said the core provider recently onboarded a credit union with $2.4 billion of assets and about 188,000 account holders.

“We feel if community financial institutions are not paying attention to this, they will become [like] Blackberry or Blockbuster,” said Pathak.

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