Sunrise Banks is putting together a “strike team” to transform ACH originations into an automated process from a manual one. The Minneapolis, Minn.-based bank with $1.2 billion in assets plans to hire five to six new employees to tackle the automation project, Chief Information Officer Brett Cooksey told Bank Automation News.

Currently, ACH — the transfer of money between accounts at different banks — is a manual process for Sunrise that has checks and balances built into it. The bank receives inbound files and processes them internally with several manual intervention checks before uploading and submitting the messages to the Federal Reserve Board.

Automating the ACH system will support the community bank’s fintech partners, for whom it provides back-end banking services and support. One of Sunrise’s most important partnerships is providing the bank function for fintechs that offer prepaid store cards. Cooksey estimated that Sunrise is one of about 20 community banks nationwide that play in this niche space.

“We want to provide our partners the ability to send ACH messages with API and, internally, we will automate our checks and validations, and directly integrate with our platform that sends these messages to the Fed — all with a user interface for our operations team to monitor activity and resolve exceptions,” Cooksey said.

API, or application programmable interface, is code that allows different softwares to talk to each other.

The bank’s former IT strategy was to outsource everything to software-as-a-service vendors. It’s a popular path to digitalization, but an approach with which Cooksey philosophically disagrees.

“The problem is, you’re stuck with that vendor’s understanding of your digital IP,” Cooksey said. “The beauty of building it yourself is you can have your technology directly mimic your IP or your business process versus trying little workarounds and customizations, and paying for that anyway.”

In its effort to devise a strike team for ACH automations, the Sunrise Bank plans to hire:

• a solutions architect, who can lead integration architecture and understands API and web scale messaging, as well as transactional integrity for ACH origination;
• a business analyst who can moonlight as a scrum master;
• a secondary senior engineer, who will “cut the code,” test it and run the code delivery pipelines;
• an infrastructure engineer, who’s versed in the Azure DevOps ecosystem; and
• a support analyst.

Automating ACH involves high volume data that’s at the highest risk of fraud, according to Cooksey. “It’s such a high-risk maneuver that you just got to throw bodies at it to make it scale,” he said.