Jack Henry Connect 2026: Symitar Positioned to Drive Credit Unions into the Future
By John San Filippo
In early 2022, Jack Henry announced a technological pivot of sorts that the company characterized as a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) strategy. At the time, Finopotamus spoke with then-CEO David Foss about the implications of this new approach.
The centerpiece of this new strategy, Foss explained, was an as-yet-unnamed platform that, while not exactly a core processing platform, would be intended to complement and eventually supplant other Jack Henry cores.
In the ensuing years, Finopotamus spoke regularly with Jack Henry executives regarding the company’s progress with this initiative. The most recent conversations took place at Jack Henry Connect 2026, held in Kansas City, Mo., Oct. 18-21. Finopotamus had the opportunity to speak with both President of Credit Union Solutions Brynn Ammon and company COO Shanon McLachlan about the latest developments.
The undertaking is now simply referred to as “Platform.” And while there’s no longer an emphasis on BaaS, the central premise of the initiative remains the same. Platform ensures that all Jack Henry financial institutions, including credit unions running the Symitar core processing platform, have at their disposal a modern, flexible, future-ready technology stack.
A Compassionate Path to Modernization
Modernizing a core system with decades of deeply entrenched credit union workflows is no small feat, especially when the goal is to avoid the disruption of a “rip-and-replace” full core conversion. According to Ammon, Jack Henry recognized early on that forcing institutions onto an isolated system was not a viable path.
“We always knew building a sidecar and then telling all of our clients, ‘You have to go migrate to this or convert to this brand-new sidecar,’ wasn’t a sustainable business strategy for us,” Ammon said. “In doing so and in providing the optionality that we wanted to provide to our clients where we’ve landed, we created confusion. We understand that.”
To clear up that confusion, Jack Henry spent the past year refining its engineering and messaging around how foundational cores like Symitar and SilverLake connect to Platform. That included consolidating user interface development. Ammon noted that work on a standalone third iteration of Jack Henry Xperience was canceled so engineering teams could unify around Platform as the singular cloud-native user experience.
“Continued modernization of the foundational cores is happening, but the journey is Platform,” Ammon explained. “All of this at the end of the day is about pace of innovation for our clients and their ability to move faster.”
Platform allows credit unions to adopt cloud-native components at their own pace while preserving the regulatory and operational logic built into Symitar over the past four decades. Ammon recounted a story from the conference’s CEO Forum in which a credit union executive was pitched by a third-party developer who claimed to have coded a brand-new core system overnight using artificial intelligence.
“What they don’t have is 40 years’ worth of edge cases and regulatory scrutiny that they’ve run through,” Ammon said. “If you buy a core off the shelf of just some drive-through core, you’re going to get a drive-through core.”
Above the Waterline
For McLachlan, the message at Connect 2026 was that years of foundational architecture work – what he referred to as work “below the waterline” – are now paying off in live production environments.
“Platform is amazing, and it’s in production,” McLachlan said. “We have a lot of customers that are taking components of Platform and using it at different rates, at different levels, at different maturities. We have lots of clients using our wires. We’ve got more clients using our exceptions. And the exceptions are not exception item processing; it’s exception processing. Any exception from anywhere in the system can be fed through the exception manager.”
McLachlan emphasized the granular flexibility of this approach for Symitar credit unions.
“Like you say, ‘I want to not use Symitar exceptions anymore, I want to use Platform exceptions,’” McLachlan said. “You can do it a branch or an individual at a time. So, they can take it on at their own pace.”
Some institutions are taking an even bigger leap. McLachlan noted that Hope Credit Union was highlighted on the main stage for launching a new digital brand built entirely on Platform. Furthermore, Platform’s underlying architecture gives Symitar capabilities that legacy cores struggle to match – such as supporting emerging digital assets.
“To do stablecoin, you’ve got to have six decimals of precision on balance fields,” McLachlan noted. “Platform has nine digits of decimal position by default. We were able to spin up one of our customers that wanted to do a stablecoin proof of concept – spun them up in two weeks.”
Database Evolution Under the Hood
To take full advantage of modern cloud architecture, Symitar’s underlying database structure has also been evolving. Historically, Symitar ran on a hierarchical database (HDB) written in PL/I. Over time, Jack Henry moved the majority of its credit union clients to a hybrid environment utilizing the Symitar Enterprise Database (SEDB) to remove record limits and allow large credit unions to scale.
Today, roughly 115 to 125 of Symitar’s 715 credit union clients have migrated to the Symitar SQL Database (SSDB). Now, Jack Henry is taking the next step by eliminating the legacy database abstraction layer to establish a direct path to SQL. Crucially, Ammon noted that this database modernization happens without disrupting daily credit union operations.
“The database underneath is changing, but the application and how the end user uses it doesn’t change,” Ammon said. “All of that stays the same at the UI level until you start moving into Platform. And then that’s when things start to get different from a user perspective. That’s when we’re then leapfrogging into modernization because now we’re using cloud-based, way-modern tools, web-based tools that are incredibly intuitive that everybody’s been asking for and looking for years.”
Payments, AI and the Trust Factor
Beyond core processing, McLachlan pointed to rapid advancements in payments and small business banking as critical to helping credit unions maintain primary financial relationships.
“It used to be if you owned the account, you owned the relationship,” McLachlan said. “Now it’s if you own the payment, you own the relationship, and it’s going to be only more and more like that. You have to remove friction from payments.”
At Connect, Jack Henry highlighted Moov Money, a new peer-to-peer payment solution that utilizes debit rails to send institution-branded payments to anyone with a debit card. McLachlan also noted strong momentum for small business tools, with Jack Henry Rapid Transfers reaching approximately 170 financial institutions and Tap2Local reaching 900 installs – recently enhanced with a real-time digital catalog feature that uses AI to generate product images on the fly.
Looking ahead, Ammon pointed out that Platform’s infrastructure – including an AI gateway and store-and-forward layer – positions credit unions for an era of agentic AI.
“There’s an army of agents coming to knock on every institution’s door, and if we don’t believe that, then we will get left behind as well,” Ammon said. “In the future, it’s not going to matter what the website looks like. It’s not going to matter how pretty it is. It’s not going to matter how intuitive it is because the robot’s the one that’s going to look at it. They’re the one that’s going to be doing transactions.”
Even as autonomous agents and cloud platforms reshape the technological landscape, both executives stressed that human relationships and institutional trust remain the ultimate differentiators. On the governance side, Jack Henry has rebuilt client trust by shifting to six-month published roadmaps across roughly 70 product families, boosting roadmap delivery attainment from 68% to over 90%. On the philosophy side, the goal is ensuring technology enhances, rather than replaces, the credit union difference.
“Our credit unions are people helping people, not agents helping people,” Ammon said. “While some of the transactional things may shift and move, it’s how do we as a tech provider help the institution maintain their humanness in a digital-forward world that I think is going to be the key to success.”
