Viewpointe was founded by big banks in 2000 to do one thing: store digital images of checks.
The need became clear when the physical transportation of checks temporarily ground to a halt after 9/11, and later when legislation known as Check 21 let banks handle more checks electronically.
The Charlotte, North Carolina, company — which is owned by Bank of America, Truist Financial, U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo and IBM — still loads more than 10 billion images each year to its archive. Checks are its largest business. But the type of data it holds has expanded over time to include documents, messages, emails and statements relating to accounts, loans, lockbox services and clearing and settlements.
“Right now, we are managing well over 100 billion digitized documents,” said Tim Coff, president and CEO of Viewpointe.
But the company, like its bank clients, knows it needs to modernize and provide services beyond imaging checks and other documents. To continue this expansion, it is migrating to a public cloud.
“It’s a legacy service around the check space, and it’s indicative of where a lot of banking heritage systems are today from an application perspective,” said Steven Dickens, senior analyst at Futurum Research, a research and advisory firm that focuses on digital innovation. “Most large and even medium-to-large organizations that have been around the banking sector more than 10 or 15 years are facing the same challenge: legacy applications that need to be modernized to adapt to competitive and end-user demands.”
In December, Viewpointe and its longtime partner, the information-technology infrastructure services provider Kyndryl, announced that they were working together to migrate Viewpointe’s traditional infrastructure to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Transitioning mission-critical applications from a private cloud to a public cloud is something many banks still hesitate to do, because of concerns about resilience and cybersecurity.
Dickens said Viewpointe and Kyndryl’s process is a lot more transformational than “a lift and shift, ‘let’s pick up this old mess and put it on some different infrastructure.’"
Instead, says Matt Milton, Kyndryl’s U.S. president, it’s a “full-stack modernization” of Viewpointe’s IT infrastructure and operations, or updates to Viewpointe’s hardware, middleware and applications to become cloud-native on Microsoft Azure. He says it is a necessary change so Viewpointe can expand its services. Legacy infrastructure may also be at risk of security attacks.
In the future, Viewpointe plans to roll out new content services, such as allowing for secure data sharing across different banks.
The two companies chose Azure because they felt it was the most secure and resilient of the cloud providers for highly regulated content. Viewpointe’s familiarity with Microsoft 365 was another plus.
“When you start to build solutions for each content type, before you know it there are multiple silos and archives,” said Coff. “We’ve been running on a secure platform for 20 years, but like every other company, we had to look at our own technology and say, it is serving us well today, but what do we need for tomorrow?”
Coff said that transitioning from a private cloud to a public cloud took some getting used do, but that Azure will provide the same, if not better, security and reliability at a better price point.
“It’s taken time for the industry to become more comfortable with the security and privacy technologies that can be wrapped around the Azure environment,” he said. “You are going to see more and more of it as the public cloud becomes more mainstream for the financial services industry.”
Viewpointe has more than 15 clients, including its original bank owners, other financial institutions, Fiserv and the Federal Reserve. Kyndryl spun out from IBM in November and started trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Although the need for this undertaking preceded the pandemic, the pandemic was a catalyst for change, similar to how certain events spurred Viewpointe’s founding 20 years ago.
“The pandemic has pushed more folks to adopt a digital means of doing business,” said Coff. “It’s putting more pressure on legacy systems.”
He adds that Viewpointe’s evolution is a natural progression of what it was created to do.
“If Viewpointe can help solve these challenges related to the complexity of managing digital content, those banks can focus on what is most important to them, which is serving the customers and communities they operate in,” he said.
