United Mississippi Bank frees up internal IT resources through Jack Henry

United Mississippi Bank continues to use Jack Henry’s Hosted Network Solutions to enhance its IT infrastructure without adding employees.  

In 2017, United Mississippi Bank Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer Christopher Maxwell was looking to improve IT operations, including the need for two full-time IT employees, he told Bank Automation News.

However, adding headcount was costly, with some IT applicants expecting to be paid more than a bank’s chief executive, Maxwell said. “That doesn’t fit” for the $452 million, Natchez, Miss.-based bank, he said.  

“Hosted Network Solutions (HNS) was specifically designed for financial institutions to host any Windows- or Linux-based servers in Jack Henry’s secure and fully redundant private cloud platform,” Nick Shirk, national director of sales and information security and technology, told BAN.  

The bank’s third-party service contracts were expiring in 2017 and it was time for a hardware refresh, expected to cost about $1 million, Maxwell said. While determining the best path to improve hardware and virtual servers, Maxwell talked with the Jack Henry team as well as banks that had already implemented HNS. 

The bank is in its third three-year contract with HNS, Maxwell said. The platform meant the bank wouldn’t need to hire more full-time employees.  

“By effectively transferring risks and management responsibilities to Jack Henry, financial institutions can free internal IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives to better serve their account holders,” Shirk said. 

Nashville, Tenn.-based FirstBank and Panama City Beach, Fla.-based Innovations Credit Union are among financial institutions that have moved their network infrastructure to HNS, according to the Jack Henry website.  

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