With 62 community banks and credit unions migrated in the past year, this significant milestone means that all Fusion Phoenix bank and credit union customers that have opted for cloud delivery are running in Azure.

In February 2020, Finastra announced its plan to bring Fusion Phoenix to the cloud with two early adopters, Commerce National Bank & Trust and Commencement Bank, accessing the platform through Azure. Today, 100% of its existing core customers opting for cloud delivery have been migrated to Azure. Banks and credit unions can now consume - rather than own and run - core applications, freeing up IT resources to focus on competitiveness and growth. Other benefits include access to enhanced capabilities to mine data for insight and the ability to scale services to keep pace with need. One client that has moved to the cloud, Horicon Bank, views the cloud as the future of core delivery.

According to Mark Nelson, EVP CIO/COO at Horicon Bank, “The cloud is all about the scalability and the ability to access innovation much faster and much more cost effectively. It enables us to compete with the big banks, in terms of products, service, and customer experience.”

“Cloud technology is a big enabler for financial institutions, particularly smaller ones, as it provides a low-cost path for innovation and Open Banking, leveling the playing field for them to compete with the large banks and non-bank fintech,” said John Weinkowitz, VP, Retail, Community Markets at Finastra. “This initiative also enables Finastra to run large financial institutions on the Fusion Phoenix platform and will provide many other benefits to our existing customers, such as improved availability, security and system monitoring.”

“Migrating to a cloud-based core solves a number of problems inherent to legacy cores, including the issue of interconnectivity between different banking channels and solutions,” said David Koscheski, director of Industry, Banking, Microsoft. “Fortunately, cloud-based core migrations are far simpler than previous core transformations, due to the streamlined efficiency of the process.”

Migrating customers to Fusion Phoenix run in Azure was a quick and painless process for Finastra’s customers, with each migration taking no more than five working days per customer, without the need to rewrite any existing code.

This announcement underlines Finastra’s ongoing commitment to offer its customers an option for cloud deployment for all major products. Finastra selected Azure as the platform to provide its cloud-hosted solutions, which already include Finastra’s Fusion MortgagebotLOS, Fusion uOpen, Fusion Global PAYplus, Fusion Essence, FusionFabric.cloud, and most recently, Fusion Invest. Together with Microsoft, Finastra can offer the highest standards of security, resiliency, performance and operating excellence.