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Banno Glossary

The Banno Glossary contains terms that are used commonly throughout Banno’s teams that you might not know or fully understand. If you find some piece of terminology you don’t understand, open an issue or pull request on the wiki. There is a section specific to Credit Unions at the bottome. For terms you find when interacting with other teams, JHA also has an acronyms page that may be of use.

Account

An account refers to one of a user’s banking accounts, including types such as Checking, Savings, and Loans. Banno pulls accounts from both banking cores and aggregation and stores them in our own format, keeping relevant information we or users may need to perform transactions or enable features of our apps.

Aggregation

Users who do not use a Jack Henry core get their information updated via our aggregation engine. We automate logging into a user’s online banking on their behalf, pulling their account information and performing activities as we would with core customers. This is a slower process than direct core connection, but allows us to sell our product to a larger customer base.

Banno User

Our representation of a user in our services. Users are associated with a username and password used to access our services, and will have any number of logins and accounts tied to their unique ID.

Batch Fetch

Similar to a fetch, though initiated by MDS itself (via a Che process) to update Banno’s stored user data with fresh account and bill pay data.

BSL - Business Service Layer

A NetTeller API for performing actions for a NetTeller user. The BSL implementation for Banno provides services for dormancy prevention, password management, alias management, enrollment, and retrieving user and account information. While dormancy prevention is the only service being used by Banno today, password management is currently being implemented.

BU - Business Unit

A Business Unit is a distinct sub-organization of JHA. Examples of different business units include:

  • Treasury
  • Internet Solutions
  • Banno

Cash Management

A NetTeller-specific kind of business user. Companies set up Cash Management (CM) accounts that can be shared among their employees. The company has control over employee permissions, including who can view which accounts and who can make bill payments from which accounts. In-depth reading on the CM bill pay can be found here.

Core

A backend banking system that provides basic functionality for a group of financial institutions, including general ledger, transactions, and transfers.

Supported Cores are (TODO: links or description of each):

  • CIF 20/20
  • Core Director
  • Episys (a product of Symitar)
  • SilverLake

CU - Credit Union

A member-owned financial cooperative, democratically controlled by its members, and operated for the purpose of promoting thrift, providing credit at competitive rates, and providing other financial services to its members.

The Credit Union Glossary also features specific terminology.

Fetch

  1. Fetch describes a number of services we use to collect information about a user’s accounts. This information is gathered via core integration or aggregation and requires some form of authentication from the user.

  2. A specific task that is the result of calling PUT /users/(userId)/fetch that triggers aggregation of data for the user. The primary means for the client to initiate updating of data on the API side (while also consuming the updates emitted on the task by the API).

FI - Financial Institution

A bank or credit union, generally used in reference to our customers.

GoDough

A bank-branded (white label) mobile banking solution built on top of NetTeller that provides “standard” core banking functionality to consumers.

JHA - Jack Henry & Associates

The main organization that encompasses all the individual business units.

Jxchange

A services-oriented architecture on a .NET platform that provides open connectivity between Jack Henry Banking’s cores, complementary products, and third-party niche solutions. This is the service layer we interact with for all the functionality a core provides (transactions, accounts, transfers, etc).

Login

As a verb, authenticating into a service. Usually this means a website via aggregation or a core via one of our core integrations.

As a noun, this refers to the account information and credentials associated with logging in to a particular service. Generally this includes a username, password, and associated institution. Login can also refer to a specific login attempt by a user.

NetTeller

A bank-branded (white label) Online Banking application for financial institutions and their consumer and retail customers/members.

PDLC - Product Development Life Cycle

The process by which a product is created, from inception to market. This includes discovery, analysis, development, release, and support.

PSCU

PSCU is a partner of JHA for debit and credit cards. Many of our credit unions also have a direct relationship with them for similar services. JHA’s Card Processing Services (CPS) group chose them to partner with for their new debit card platform and for full service credit cards. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSCU and https://www.pscu.com/about.)

Reconciliation

This term refers to comparing core data to Banno’s copied or derived data and updating as necessary.

SDLC - Software Development Life Cycle

The software development life cycle (SDLC) is a framework that define tasks performed at each step in the software development process.

SSO - Single Sign-On

Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication process that allows a user to access multiple applications with one set of login credentials. This is used in our apps to expose third party functionality that we can’t expose through our native UI & API.

Several example features from our apps include:

  • Account opening & loan applications
  • Geezeo, a PFM (Personal Financial Management) budgeting tool
  • Harland check reordering
  • ESI documents
  • iPay Bill Pay site (exposes full set of bill pay features that we don’t currently support)

Symxchange

Essentially “Jxchange for credit unions”, a service layer to interact with the Episys core.

Sync

The fetch task plus calling as many GET API endpoints as necessary to hydrate/refresh the client’s local cache. You can see a somewhat out of date (but close enough to accurate to understand what’s going on) implementation here: https://gist.github.com/chrisHoekstra/22697057939be03d29a849078ddbc87b

Task

A general term for a longer running operation controlled by the API that emits one or more task events to be consumed (and possibly replied to) by the client

Task Event

TODO

White-label

An app created with the intention of customers rebranding and theming to give the appearance of the app having been tailor-made for that brand. Most of our apps are white-label apps which are given customer-specific themes and deployed on behalf of those customers.

Credit Union

Alternate Accounts

A 10-digit number that is a member account where the Preference Access type is set to (2) Alternate account. This may be further narrowed down to a specific share or loan on that membership.

CU - Credit Union

A member-owned financial cooperative, democratically controlled by its members, and operated for the purpose of promoting thrift, providing credit at competitive rates, and providing other financial services to its members.

Host Account

A 10-digit number that is the member account number the Preference Access Record is on.

Linked Account

A 10-digit number that is any member account where a Preference Access Record was created (refers to both transfer only and alternate). This may be further narrowed down to a specific share or loan on that membership.

Member [account] Number

When a user opens a membership with a credit union, the Episys system assigns a unique 10 digit number. Credit unions call this the account number. It is stored in the Episys Account record in the Number field. Under this membership, the user can have several shares and loans. Those shares and loans are assigned a 2-4 digit number. Credit unions call these IDs or suffixes. This can be very confusing so Banno has created slightly different terms to emulate the typical bank terms. The 10-digit number is referred to as the “Member [account] Number”. And a share or loan is an account. Banno stores the share and loan accounts as the member number, plus the category (S=share, L=loan), plus the ID. For example, 0000012345S0000. This assignment makes a unique identifier for each share or loan. Credit unions understand this combination but do not have it stored in Episys as such.

MICR Number

For banks, the bottom of a personal check is the account number. However, for credit unions, the bottom of the check is not typically the member account number. Credit unions have to assign a unique number and each credit union does it differently. This number is referred to as the magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) number. Episys has a field on each Share or Loan record called the MICR Account Number to store the assigned MICR number. Banno uses that field in the account details display. Not all credit unions store the number in that field, and may have it in another record.

FYI - When Banno is searching for check images, Banno uses the MICR number from the transaction information.

Transfer Only Account

A 10-digit number that is a member account where the Preference Access type is set to (0) Transfer out.