Its Jack Henry Banking® division announced today that 25 of its currently supported core bank customers chose to migrate from in-house processing to its outsourced offering, JHA OutLink Processing Services™ (JHA OPS), during fiscal year 2014; which compares to approximately the same number of bank customers to make this decision the previous four years.

JHA OPS provides more than 600 banks across three core processing platforms - SilverLake System®, CIF 20/20® and Core Director® - with turnkey outsourcing solutions. Banks are served through strategically located data centers and image-enabled item processing centers and receive on-demand access to more than 140 integrated complementary products and services. Damariscotta, Maine-based The First Bancorp and Univest Corporation in Souderton, Pa. are two institutions that elected to eliminate the capital expenditures required for in-house processing and migrate to an outsourced environment.

The First Bancorp was facing two paramount challenges: updating its IBM hardware and shoring up disaster recovery processes to meet regulatory requirements, both of which carried significant costs. To help ensure compliance and reduce expenses, the $1.5 billion bank moved its SilverLake System core platform to JHA OPS.

According to Tony McKim, president and chief operating officer of The First Bancorp, "Outsourcing solved two significant problems for our bank and was an easy decision once we saw the resources that would be saved. Relying on the Jack Henry team's expertise allows us to turn our attention away from technology maintenance and back to serving our customers. The flexibility and scalability of outsourcing provides our customers with a better experience while the bank sees tangible savings as we dedicate less time and money to hardware updates, end-of-day processing and software releases."

For $2.2 billion Univest Corporation, outsourcing was seen as the most effective way to address succession planning issues after more than 18 years of in-house processing. Eric Conner, chief technology officer and EVP of Univest, said, "Turning our system management over to Jack Henry Banking has helped us avoid the issues that arise when 35-year bank veterans retire and take irreplaceable system knowledge with them. In addition, outsourcing helped us address regulatory pressure related to disaster recovery while providing us with security assurance that we could never produce on our own. The benefits of outsourcing have been beyond expectation and will enable us to continue our aggressive growth strategy with more predictable IT costs, material technology enhancements, a more integrated operating environment and expert technology management."

Stan Viner, general manager of sales for Jack Henry Banking, said, "We continue to see banks ranging from community banks to multibillion dollar mid-tier institutions like The First Bancorp and Univest take advantage of the value provided by JHA OutLink Processing Services. As these institutions face a tougher competitive landscape, increased regulatory pressure and more demand from consumers for cutting-edge technology, it is important that they can rely on a trusted partner like Jack Henry Banking to manage their technology so they can remain focused on their business and their customers. Through our extensive network of data centers, image-enabled item processing centers, training centers, and disaster recovery hot sites, we are able to offer highly customized outsourcing services that support the dynamic business strategies and growth goals of diverse banks nationwide."