Financial services

Interview:

Open Solutions enables community collaboration

24 November 2011

Karen McCandless speaks to Open Solutions to find out more about its DNAcreator and DNAappstore offerings.

Earlier this year, Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Open Solutions collaborated with Microsoft to deliver its DNAcreator and DNAappstore offerings. DNAcreator, which is built on Microsoft .NET, extends the Open Solutions DNA platform to allow partners, customers and independent developers to create and integrate custom applications that can then be downloaded by financial services institutions in the DNAappstore online marketplace (www.dnaappstore.com).

The Open Solutions offerings have already seen a lot of success with Redstone Federal Credit Union turning its internal development team into a profit centre through the creation and sharing of custom financial services applications.

Karen McCandless spoke to Chris VanDerStad (vice president of architecture), Erik Nilsen (DNAappstore product manager) and Lizette Nigro (vice president, product marketing), to find out more.

Why did you decide to bring the DNAcreator and DNAappstore offerings to market?
Lizette Nigro: There has been considerably more regulatory and market pressure on community-based financial institutions, banks and credit unions, which is our core market. As a result, these organisations need to find ways to deliver more products and services quickly and less expensively than they have previously. In the past, financial services organisations couldn’t afford to run huge internal development teams so they has to go to a provider to get a custom environment built for them. As many of these custom functionality items can be shared between multiple financial institutions, we wanted to come up with a way that financial institutions could develop and create extended functionality in a way that is easy to use and in a familiar development environment. They could then share what they had created in an inexpensive way with other banks and credit unions globally.

It’s about helping organisations improve services for their members, operate more efficiently, cross-sell and up-sell more successfully and reduce the resources needed to serve customers

Erik Nilsen, Open Solutions What exactly do DNACreator and DNAappstore do?
Chris VanDerStad: DNACreator is a tool that allows developers to extend the functionality of our core DNA platform. We wanted to make this tool as extensible and flexible as possible so we built it in Visual Studio, allowing developers to use the native .NET programming languages to build the extra features.

Erik Nilsen: DNAappstore goes hand in hand with DNACreator. You have a tool to create apps and extra functionality and then the DNAappstore is the marketplace where these apps can be downloaded by financial institutions. DNAappstore showcases a host of solutions that credit unions and banks can use to extend core functionality to help them provide a better experience and reporting functionality to enable front office staff to sell products better and more efficiently.

What benefits do they provide for financial institutions?
EN: It’s about helping organisations improve services for their members, operate more efficiently, cross-sell and up-sell more successfully and reduce the resources needed to serve customers. We offer apps to institutions that wouldn’t normally be able to develop their own – it’s a plug and play way to use our core banking platform. If you are a small credit union with no development staff and you have an idea you can post it on the forum and see if people will build it for you. It is not only a service support tool but also a place where ideas can be shared. It links buyers and sellers.

CV: It allows Open Solutions more flexibility in delivering apps to our clients. We also provide a marketplace where developers who were already creating apps can showcase them to financial institutions. We also have a forum where members can ask questions and we can support them through this – it’s a community where companies can share information, tips and best practices. But developers can also talk about tips and techniques, and functionality they would like to see. In addition, we have a lot of reseller partners in other countries who are localising these apps, which allows us to get into these countries quicker.

LN: Open Solutions is creating apps but our clients are creating apps as well. So these organisations are able to get an ROI for their app beyond just the use by their organisation, as they can get them funded by selling the apps they create to other financial services institutions. Organisations can try apps free of charge and download them to use in a test environment.

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