16 Charlie Kelly is a Partner at Remedy Consulting and host of BankTalk Podcast. Remedy Consulting helps financial institutions (FI) thrive through specialized consulting services in System Selections, Core Contract Negotiations, Outsourcing/In-House Advisory, Bank Mergers & Acquisitions, and FI Strategic Planning. To learn more about Remedy Consulting, visit www.remedyconsult.net. So, let’s go back to Mr. CEO at the top of this article. If you were the CEO of a small core provider where profit margins are already tight, and then you lose some customers, now you hit the tipping point where you need to start laying off developers. Or, at a minimum, struggle to maintain the software without having the resources (or the interest?) to update new functionality. If this was a larger core, Mr. CEO could migrate his customers to a new product and officially sunset the older product. But smaller cores cannot do that, as they never had the resources to build a newer product. Mr. CEO is in a bad place, and although he didn’t declare a sunset of his product, he also has not built new functionality into the product. From our perspective, it would be hard to recommend the CEO’s core to one of Remedy’s clients in RFP mode. So, how can you use what we discussed? If you are responsible for making vendor decisions at your bank, keep an eye on the indicators above. If you realize that some software providers are not delivering on their roadmap items, decide what is important to you. If the product is not customer-facing, the price is low, and your team does not require cutting-edge functionality, that might be okay. Consider finding a consultant who knows market pricing during your next renewal and see if you can get a better deal. However, if a laggard product is client-facing or drives revenue for the bank, it may be time to look at other vendors to see what else is there. If you are already in the process of an RFP, have a product you like, but haven’t spent a lot of time on the product roadmap, consider talking to the vendor’s client references before buying and ask about that product’s history in developing new functionality. How many items have been delivered from the roadmap in the past 18 months? Please reach out if you are looking for help to determine if you need to complete a system selection. Continued from page 15
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