FAQs

It’s an admission that you can’t forsake the main banking business that got you here.  Run that legacy location-based business just like you do now.  Sidecore is a risk-contained second core that serves as your off ramp to the new world.  Invent, experiment, fail, learn and scale all from the safety of a risk-contained core that doesn’t require you to stop the business that still pays the paychecks (at least for now). With the exception of sending daily GL entries to your accounting system, Sidecore steers clear of legacy core integration.

It’s partly because the muscle memory is gone, and it’s partly because legacy core systems won’t allow it. FIs have outsourced so much of what they do that many of them have lost the skills (and sometimes the will) to do real product creation and innovation. We’ve got to get that back. We’ve got to get back to a culture that rewards hard work.  But even progressive FIs are beholden to the limitations imposed on them by decades-old systems that were built before the internet existed.  Sidecore acts as an end-run around those antiquated systems.  For progressive FIs that are eager to re-invent what banking can be, we think the secret is to build a risk-contained startup within the bank.

APIs are indeed everywhere now and have become another one of the buzz terms you’ll see littered across the marketing landscape in banking tech. The better question to ask is what technology is underneath them? There is nothing magical about APIs or web services and the complexity and age of the systems under legacy core APIs severely limits what APIs enable you to do. Said another way: Putting APIs over old systems doesn’t make them new systems.

Not as much as you’d think.  Consider that the more complex a system, the more places there are for problems.  The links between systems in the old banking business (hundreds of them) each represent a point of failure, whether it’s security, reliability, maintainability… etc.

‘Cloud’ is a term being thrown about far too loosely in our industry. Even the big old legacy core vendors are claiming ‘cloud’. There is a big difference between running cloud-native software and moving a server to the cloud. With Sidecore you have a product that was created from scratch and specifically designed for cloud computing.

No.  Your existing customers and underlying products are fundamentally tied to your legacy core system.  We do not pretend to be the turnkey solution to instantly transforming the existing business.  And if another provider claims to have such a solution, well, good luck with that.  We do believe that the industry will ultimately figure out away to move on from legacy cores, but the industry isn’t particularly close to having that solution yet.  Sidecore gives you the ability to get started building new business in a safe, risk-controlled environment that does not force FIs to “bet the business.”