2024 03-25 Janusea Partner - Boucoup

BankingON Partners with Janusea to Empower Credit Unions to serve Millennial Parents with Teenagers

by BlogsNews

Cypress, TX, April 2, 2024 – Janusea, provider of seamless and secure integrations to credit union core systems, is pleased to announce its strategic partnership with BankingON, the developers of the family banking platform Boucoup. By becoming a Janusea platform partner, BankingON will be able to expedite the implementation process and ensure the utmost integrity and reliability of banking core integrations.

“Our partnership with Jausea is going to boost the scale and reliability of the Boucoup platform,” said Alexey Krasnoriadtsev, CEO at BankingON. “Those who have experience working on core platforms understand the difficulties that come with interfacing a product with multiple cores. With Janusea, we can focus on improving the Boucoup product, bringing value to teenagers and their parents, and in some sense allows us to be core agnostic.”

The Boucoup digital mobile banking application platform will provide credit unions with a solution that grows their minor accounts, helps its members build confidence in the financial system, and even graduates them when they turn 18. As such, this partnership allows BankingON to deliver a platform which maintains memberships within the credit union’s core and builds brand familiarity.

Since Janusea shoulders the burden of core integrations for credit unions and fintechs alike, this partnership gives BankingON the ability to normalize otherwise disparate member data across many cores.

“Especially in the case of our fintech partners,” said Janusea’s CEO Kyle Stutzman, “Janusea’s main purpose is to let companies like BankingON be innovative. There is already a high barrier to entry within the financial industry. So, not having to worry about how your product is going to unify its integrations from customer to customer, opens a lot of doors and possibilities.”

By leveraging Janusea’s game-changing integration solution, Boucoup provides parents with the chance to instill sound financial habits in their children. This is achieved through securely overseeing money management using a cutting-edge mobile app seamlessly integrated into the credit union experience. 

About BankingON

BankingON is an Austin-based CUSO of B2B2C digital banking solutions committed to empowering Credit Unions to help parents raise money-smart children. Boucoup, its family finance platform, helps CUs offer a valuable, free, branded mobile app for parents and teens. With Boucoup, parents can teach teens essential money skills, including earning, spending, and saving, through a fun and interactive platform. Teen-optimized UI and features include instant allowances, chore-based rewards, flexible spending controls, and real-time transaction notifications, all within one seamless mobile app. To learn more about Boucoup, visit us at https://www.boucoup.com or send us an email at info@boucoup.com.

About Janusea 

Janusea, Inc. fills a technology gap in the community financial institution space, connecting credit unions and community banks with today’s innovative fintech solutions. Many fintechs cannot communicate with a financial institution’s legacy core system. Janusea is the connection between these two worlds via a fully-hosted platform delivered securely using the cloud. Ultimately, Janusea provides community financial institutions with speed to market, free choices to work with the best solutions and sustainable API integration. For more information, visit www.janusea.com.

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Janusea Achieves SOC 2 Type II Attestation

by BlogsNews

Janusea, an integration platform provider for fintechs and financial institutions, announces the successful completion of its SOC 2 Type II attestation. This attestation, obtained after a thorough evaluation by CyberGuard Compliance, validates Janusea’s dedication to ensuring and maintaining the highest industry standards of security, availability, processing integrity, and confidentiality of its systems and services.

CyberGuard Compliance, founded in 2011, specializes in addressing service-related risks for clients worldwide and offers tailored solutions to organizations ranging from Fortune 50 Companies to start-ups. Their meticulous approach ensures that all service-related risks are effectively managed, providing clients with peace of mind and confidence in their operations.

As fintechs and financial institutions navigate the complexities of digital transformation, Janusea remains a trusted partner, offering reliable and seamless legacy banking core integration solutions and technology that enable organizations to innovate and thrive in the evolving landscape of financial services. The SOC 2 Type II attestation reaffirms Janusea’s commitment to delivering integration solutions that are secure, compliant, and meet the needs of the industry.

“We know our customers provide trusted services to their members, customers, and financial institutions.” says Kyle Stutzman, CEO of Janusea. “We are proud to be part of this industry and strive to maintain the highest levels of trust, internal controls, and compliance needed by our partners.”

union square credit union - square (6)

Case Study: Union Square Credit Union

by Blogs

Union Square Credit Union (Union Square), a $670M+ credit union serving nearly 40,000 members in the greater Wichita Falls, Texas area, is committed to its concept of “people helping people.” Union Square has established a robust technology stack, ensuring the safety and compliance of its infrastructure, minimizing risks, and setting them up for agility in adopting solutions in the future. Since beginning down a path of digital transformation, Union Square has also joined forces with Janusea, a Pure IT partner, to enable seamless middleware solutions.

Partnering with Pure IT

In 2017, Union Square did an Infrastructure and Operations Assessment with Pure IT to help streamline technology, people, processes, and business requirements. Pure IT compiled a list of suggestions and created a technology roadmap to assist Union Square in uncovering where they are, where they should be, and how to fill the technological gaps to get there.

To address network connectivity, Pure IT implemented an SD-WAN infrastructure that provided staff with faster connections across all four branches while lowering operational costs. By replacing the existing MPLS connection with SD-WAN technology, Union Square has boosted connectivity by 20x and slashed costs by over 60%! Coupling the SD-WAN with a new firewall infrastructure ensures the system’s security and redundancy on IT and core connectivity while minimizing environmental risk.

Union Square has also significantly improved business efficiencies by upgrading to a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. This technology aligns with their growing organizational and member needs, replacing outdated hardware that was causing delayed transaction processing times. Moreover, VDI enables work-from-home capabilities and empowers Union Square to bring financial services directly to their members, regardless of their location. Union Square also continues to attract top talent with a flexible, hybrid work environment.

Joe Guidry, CIO at Union Square, adds, “It gives us peace of mind… having the ability to partner with a company that has experts in everything from switches to firewalls to virtualization is huge.”

In addition to the continued management of the Firewall, Network, and VDI, Union Square also partners with Pure IT for vCISO advisory services, enhancing and maturing their security posture as an organization. Pure IT also supports Union Square’s End Users, Desktops, and Servers.

A collaborative approach to management allows Pure IT to provide top-notch support and service while allowing Union Square to focus on serving members. Over the last six years, Union Square has seen an 81% increase in total assets, alongside a 45% increase in overall membership, a true testament to Union Square’s commitment to community growth and innovation.

In their journey to continue focusing on their greater strategic and member-focused initiatives, Union Square and Pure IT identified more areas to increase speed to market and eliminate manual processes around onboarding fintechs. Pure IT has the perfect partner – Janusea.

Partnering with Janusea

Credit Unions often struggle to incorporate third-party services for many reasons: compliance, budgeting, and the most difficult of them all, core integrations.

“Digital transformation is easy to say, hard to do, and even harder to do right…” – Joe Guidry

As a middleware partner, Janusea can connect a credit union’s core (yes, any core!) to communicate with any technology application. Once connected, the credit union has the capability to easily connect to other vendors on Janusea’s platform or have a standard and accelerated way to integrate with vendors that have yet to join the platform.

Janusea removes the integration barrier for credit unions by providing a standard model that allows the financial industry ecosystem to benefit as a whole while allowing flexibility for the nuances that come with each specific environment. As Union Square can attest, this saves significant time and money because once the integration is done, it can be repeated for any number of business use cases.

“It’s exciting that we are providing Union Square an accelerated path to execute on the strategic vision they’ve put together with Pure IT.  All these great ideas that seemed further out are now becoming real initiatives and projects because they’ve been able to overcome the core integration barrier” – Masako Long, VP of Sales at Janusea

Union Square Credit Union’s partnership with Pure IT and Janusea has proven to be a game-changer in their journey toward digital transformation. With a forward-thinking and adaptable approach, the credit union has established itself as a prominent industry player – and we can’t wait to see what’s next. 

Learn more about Union Square Credit Union: https://www.unionsquare.org/

Learn more about Pure IT: https://pureitcuso.com

VentureTech

Janusea at VentureTech 2023: VentureTech Podcast

by with No Comment Blogs

Kyle Stutzman, CEO, and Masako Long, VP of Sales at Janusea attended VentureTech 2023, where they joined Jonathan Taylor, CEO at CU SOL, and Joshua Barclay, Growth Marketing Manager at CRMNEXT, to record an episode of the VentureTech Podcast.

This conversation covers how Janusea helps Credit Unions overcome core integration problems and empowers Credit Unions to choose and leverage technology that helps serving their members.  

If this is your first time learning about Janusea, this is a great podcast to help you understand how we might be able to help you!

Grab a listen here!

real-time vs batch

Financial Systems Integration: Real-time vs. Batch

by with No Comment Blogs

Integrations: Real-time vs. Batch

When an FI talks with a fintech or software vendor, the question is often: Do you work with my core or systems? That is the start of the questions, not the end. It would be best if you kept asking questions. Here is one: Is the integration Real-time or Batch?

Batch Integrations: These are point-in-time extracts of data that moved from one system to another system. They often focus on large quantities of data. The data available in the software or fintech providers application is static based on the batch’s point in time of the extract.

Advantage(s): Large quantities of data can be moved with one or a series of files. Processes of data can happen when systems are less busy to reduce the impact on other vital transactions or operations. 

Disadvantage(s): These are often one-way data movements. The data can become outdated and old quickly. You have historical information but no access to current balances or member/consumer data.

Example(s): Data Warehouse, Positive balance files for debit/atm used in off-line situations, MCIF or marketing systems.

Real-time Integrations: These are active integrations, often through API (Application Programming Interface), that read and write data in real-time processing. Data is current and consistent between systems.

Advantage(s): Consumer/member data is available and live. Data changes can be written between systems to update data fields, process transactions, disperse loans, etc. 

Disadvantage(s): Large data movement can stress systems. Historically real-time integrations have been difficult and costly. This is changing with new approaches like Janusea’s platform and others working on integration frameworks and toolsets.

Example(s): Digital banking platforms, ATMs and Advanced Kiosks, Teller and Workflow solutions, call center applications that can do teller functions, etc

Both: Applications and business cases may need batch updates and real-time calls.

Example: CRM for banks and credit unions often do nightly batch pulls and real-time updates for consumer/member screens, workflow’s final writes of addresses and demographic changes, transfers, loan payments, etc. 

Hybrid: We define hybrid as real-time calls that kick off batch processing or data movement outside the API stream. This is particularly useful when systems’ API options are limited or need to be expanded. 

Example: Loan Application and Processing Systems are a good example. They may use real-item APIs for automating applications with pre-filled applications and underwriting systems, for adding a member/consumer to a core system, and for booking and dispersing a loan. But then use an API call to trigger the SFTP movement of all loan document PDFs outside of the API stream to a folder for e-document system processing. They may also use an API call to trigger a nightly reporting or loan queue process creating point-in-time information and reports sent to loan officers and executives. 

As consumer/member expectations have increased and fintech options to meet those needs have grown, real-time APIs have become more critical. For your credit union or bank, the best approach is to match the capabilities of the integration to your business case and needs.

Kryptonite

Bad Data is Kryptonite to your Integrations

by with No Comment Blogs

You probably already know about bad data if you’ve done any data projects lately. A simple example is demographic information such as addresses, phone numbers, or email addresses that are not formatted correctly or have odd characters.   We often get questions when testing an integration on why data isn’t returned and an error is received instead. That is often the best case and desired outcome for integration testing when there is bad data. Some standards and checks ensure that data conforms to the desired type.  Integrations with 3rd parties that encounter bad data can show data to members or consumers that are unintended, create broken underwriting or automated processes, fail to send alerts or mailings, or completely block access to critical services for members or consumers.

So, what do you do? If things are working, you probably don’t know about your data quality issues. You may even have systems or processes continuing to expand the problems. You can proactively use data tools to validate that all your data conforms to the expected data types. Many FIs don’t prioritize that type of project until they get into a significant data initiative.  

Short of that larger project, you can build a data quality check into your processes for new solutions and integrations. Understand your data model and requirements, or work with someone who can help. Make sure new solutions and processes don’t introduce new data issues. Use the data fields or use cases for your project to validate the key data in your systems as part of your planning and preparation for the new solution. The data cleanup is worth it. Data cleaning isn’t fun but necessary and much better to address before issues and errors arise.