Omaha-based Midwest Bankware Solutions is taking the mundane and complex issues facing financial institutions and simplifying them with their Anycore product.
Midwest Bankware Solutions is a fintech offshoot of Midwest Cloud Computing and was created to address banking process problems. Their Anycore platform is an answer to the problem surrounding banks and their ability to access their own data.
Banks have what are called “core banking solutions” that is provided to them by any one of a couple dozen core vendors. The functionality of core banking solutions is proprietary, so it’s difficult for banks to write new applications that integrate with the systems and allow them to extract data.
“They don’t want you to do that. They want the money,” said Raymond Garren, founder of Midwest Bankware Solutions and Managing Partner of Midwest Cloud Computing. “If you were to tell them that you wanted your data, [the provider of the core banking solution] is not necessarily going to give you your data for free. You’re going to have to figure out how to get it yourself.”
That’s the function of Anycore.
“We’re able to get a bank’s data out of their core so they’re able to use it for other things, such as business intelligence or feeding other systems,” said Garren. “We work with some very large companies on behalf of banks to get banking data for them.”
Garren said that with over 70 years of combined banking experience, the Midwest Bankware Solutions team has a vast understanding of the core banking solutions on the market.
In the two years since launching Midwest Bankware Solutions, the company has onboarded banks across the country, including a few large financial organizations on the west coast.
“Working with our banks directly, we harvest their data, get it out of their system and show them from a business intelligence perspective how to use their data better,” said Garren. “We provide [more accurate data] in a real-time fashion to their software providers, making the software applications the bank has licensed better.”
It’s no surprise that security is a major concern when managing the transfer of banking data. Midwest Bankware Solutions focuses on two main areas of security: network security and application security.
“We’re very tight-knit with our customers from a network security perspective,” said Garren. “We go through our own due-diligence process with every bank, making sure they don’t have any glaring holes from a network security perspective on their side. Then, we work with them to show them our security protocols from a security perspective.”
Garren said that from an application perspective, the data being collected by Anycore is encrypted, making it impossible for anyone on the Midwest Bankware Solutions side to see it.
“The data keys are not known by us, they’re kept secret even from us,” said Garren. “When we send the data to the bank, there’s no opportunity for anyone outside their organization to do anything with it because the encryption keys are only known by the source organization.”
Garren’s ability to find solutions to problems facing a variety of industries keeps him in a startup mindset. He said there are a lot of opportunities for startups to create fintech solutions for the banking industry, which is still relatively traditional and looking for innovations.
“Startup companies are very nimble, they have great ideas and are very quick to deploy,” said Garren. “That’s very attractive in today’s banking space because the large banking software providers move at two speeds, slow and slower.”
Garren said the other problem with large banking product providers is that they provide their vision of functionality and banks have to adapt to it, not the other way around.
“Whenever you’re changing your business to adapt to software, you’re making a very big mistake,” said Garren. “Fintech startups are very responsive to their customers from a functionality perspective, and that’s what we try to do. A customer can come to us with a great idea and we’re [not only] going to make that available to them, but make it available to all the customers.”
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Christine McGuigan is the Managing Editor of Silicon Prairie News.