This new offering will provide banks and financial institutions with a quick and secure way to connect their legacy IT systems to the multitude of ever-changing third-party apps and services as the U.S. moves closer to open banking adoption.

Until now, the pace of modernization has been frustratingly slow. Ninety percent of the world’s financial transactions are processed on mainframes every day, but this legacy technology is notoriously bad at talking to external applications and systems. When connecting the old with the new, traditional banks often hit a major roadblock due to the legacy technology on which their apps and processes are built.

The Open Banking SmartBridge brings speed, flexibility and compatibility to the mainframe by:

Allowing users without mainframe experience to build and maintain complex integrations through a drag and drop platform
Reducing the labor required to create APIs by up to 90 percent
With a single API, connecting legacy applications to multiple external systems, including anti-money laundering, fraud detection services and other third party banking standards

The SmartBridge easily connects core systems with open banking standards and APIs. This allows banks to integrate FinTechs and their legacy systems using industry-standard APIs without typical developer resources or timeframes. For inbound calls, third-parties have instant mainframe access to look up balances or verify account information and initiate transactions directly from legacy apps. SmartBridge also allows for real-time outbound calls from COBOL and PL/I applications to KYC, AML and fraud-detection systems without writing any code.

The Open Banking SmartBridge works in real-time to:

Allow legacy banking systems the power to initiate calls or call out to FinTechs and third parties
Use drag and drop workflows to match API granularity with developers’ needs
Create APIs using industry-accepted specifications and standards, including OpenAPI document ingestion
Add or replace fraud detection layers and other external calls without touching legacy code
Protect valuable consumer data with mainframe security integration
Deploy the API runtime on a mainframe or cloud containers like Red Hat Open Shift to ensure elastic scalability
Enable cross-functional dev teams through low code application platform

GT Software developed the backbone of Open Banking SmartBridge over the past decade, using its 35 years of mainframe expertise to test the software rigorously.