Nymbus created an in-house container-based foundation for its niche banking solutions with Nutanix and Red Hat
Overview
Nymbus helps banks, credit unions, brands, and fintechs to accelerate growth through new routes to market. This includes a full suite of banking technology applications available to modernize and optimize existing channels, as well as the operation resources to get to market quickly with a full-scale digital bank positioned at capturing new niche customer segments. To improve flexibility and accelerate customers shift to digital, Nymbus decided to move its portfolio of banking applications to private cloud technology, and for its containerized workloads, deployed Red Hat OpenShift running on Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This Kubernetes-based infrastructure helps the company rapidly develop and deliver new, innovative container-based services to its customers at scale—while maintaining critical security and regulatory compliance through joint expert support.
Key Results
| Business agility |
Rapid scalability |
Improved compliance |
|---|---|---|
| Enhanced flexibility to deliver new features faster |
Achieved scalability to simultaneously build five times as many custom solutions |
Improved security and compliance with joint vendor support |
Customers regularly come to Nymbus with ideas. Our container infrastructure from Red Hat and Nutanix helps us build niche solutions to meet their needs and help them reach strategic goals faster. We can then roll out these new capabilities to all of our customers, so everyone can benefit.
Challenge
Consumers and companies have come to expect digital banking to deliver more than just online access to traditional branch banking services. Nymbus helps community banks and credit unions enter the digital banking age through a full suite of applications, operational resources, and strategic guidance to modernize and optimize existing channels. With its all-in-one platform, Nymbus works with clients to quickly launch boutique banks for specialized customer segments—and at a lower cost than custom solutions.
“A lot of organizations are starting digital banks, but they’re not all successful. They can especially struggle at differentiating themselves in a quickly growing market,” said Larry McClanahan, Chief Product Officer, Nymbus. “We offer a unique model for online and mobile banking that we can quickly replicate and tailor for specific customer bases.
Recent projects include Hitched, soon-to-be launched by Iroquois Federal for newlyweds’ financial needs, and BankMD, launched with TransPecos Banks and tailored for medical professionals. However, Nymbus did not own its digital banking platform, restricting its flexibility to develop specialized features for clients and maintain a growing portfolio of these customizations.
“When we decided to bring the core platform for our solutions in-house, we decided to take a modular containerized approach to give us the desired flexibility and simplify management by maintaining customization as configurations,” said McClanahan.
Solution
After extensive market research, Nymbus selected Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation of its new in-house approach, running on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution from Red Hat’s partner Nutanix, which is ideal for running Kubernetes-based platforms at scale.
Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes container platform, provides a modular container-based environment for rapid, iterative development. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is optimized for hybrid cloud operations, from initial deployment to ongoing expansion and maintenance. Additionally, Nutanix integrates a complete set of data services and a full-featured container storage interface (CSI) that dramatically simplifies the configuration and management of persistent storage for stateful applications.
“Red Hat OpenShift is the standard Kubernetes platform for enterprises. Everyone understands it and it’s well supported,” said Matt Gibb, Vice President of Alliances, Nymbus. “Nutanix is the industry leader in HCI and hybrid cloud management. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is very extensible, providing comprehensive hybrid cloud management.”
Nymbus implemented its new in-house core banking foundation for its customers and launched the first solution with specialized features on the platform in just nine months.
Customer Outcome
With a container-based platform running on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Nymbus can quickly design and implement solutions to serve new market niches and differentiate itself in the competitive digital banking solutions industry. In less than a year, the company grew its feature portfolio from less than 12 to more than three dozen custom configurations.
For example, Nymbus recently introduced a detailed profile management feature for business banking that can authorize user rights to access specific features, set approval amounts, or establish time-based access restrictions. The company has also introduced additional personalization capabilities that help consumer banking customers set up and manage goals, supported by budgeting tools, to help them better understand their financial status. “Customers regularly come to Nymbus with ideas,” said McClanahan. “Our container infrastructure from Red Hat and Nutanix helps us build custom, niche solutions to meet their needs and help them reach strategic goals faster. We can then roll out these new capabilities to all of our customers, so everyone can benefit.” Nymbus can now implement up to ten of its specialized banking solutions simultaneously, five times more than with its previous IT approach.
“The scalability that our Red Hat and Nutanix technologies give us helps us support our growth strategy while meeting the needs of our fast-growing customer base,” said McClanahan.
As a growing competitor in the financial services market, Nymbus must prove that its solutions meet strict industry security and compliance requirements. The company also offers as-a-Service compliance support for many of its client digital banks. Operating on a standardized, certified technology stack, with joint expert support, helps Nymbus meet these regulations and keep its infrastructure updated with the latest patches and bug fixes.
“We have built our in-house platform on trusted enterprise technology from vendors with strong brand recognition. Working with Red Hat and Nutanix makes our customers more comfortable and confident that we can protect their systems and data — and help them protect their customers as well,” said Gibb.
Next Steps
After its success with its new, in-house container foundation, Nymbus plans to continue expanding its private cloud environment to support adding even more customer features for new consumer segments. It is currently working on personalization strategies to support development of new boutique banks.
“Our partnership with Red Hat and Nutanix gives us the flexibility to innovate, the speed to get to market fast, and the tremendous scalability to support ongoing growth,” said McClanahan. “We’re thrilled that we can better help our customers succeed in the digital banking market with unique solutions.”