Consider a familiar banking encounter: one person, three accounts, several versions of the same story. There is the checking account, the mortgage, perhaps a small business. To the customer, these belong together. Whether the bank sees that connection depends partly on something deeply unromantic: the structure of its database.
Open Solutions made that structure its business. Founded in Connecticut in 1992, the company developed software for community banks, thrifts and credit unions. Its enduring product, DNA, puts people and their relationships at the center of account processing. It is a technical choice with a surprisingly human ambition: give the institution a more coherent view of the person across the desk.
- Start with the relationship. DNA connects people, organizations and accounts in a shared data model.
- Let customers extend the software. DNAcreator and an application marketplace make room for specialized tools.
- Watch the balance sheet. An inventive product still needs a supplier with financial staying power.
01 / The person inside the machine
A banking core performs essential work: maintaining deposits, servicing loans and recording transactions. Customers usually encounter its consequences through staff, statements and digital channels. DNA supports consumer and commercial banking on a common platform, with continuous real-time processing. Its relationship model is designed to reduce redundant data and connect information that separate account records can scatter.
Imagine a business owner who also has personal savings at the bank. The useful question is how those relationships connect. Better context can help employees understand the customer’s situation; the software supplies the structure, while the institution decides how to use it. That distinction matters. A database can organize information. It cannot manufacture thoughtful service.
02 / The trouble with making everyone special
The company’s early difficulties illuminate the product. In a retrospective published by Black Dragon Capital, the account identifies founder Cliff Waggoner and describes separate banking and credit-union applications whose complexity made servicing expensive. Investors recruited Louis Hernandez Jr. as chairman and CEO. Multiple customized code lines became another maintenance problem.
The response was a common foundation with room for extensions. DNAcreator gave developers tools to add capabilities; DNAappstore provided a place to distribute them. Banks and credit unions could contribute applications themselves. That changes the customer’s role: an institution with a useful solution can become part of the development community.
The lesson for a software builder is practical. Keep the shared foundation coherent. Put specialized features into managed extensions. Every customer request deserves attention, but every request does not require a separate version of the entire product. The hard part is maintaining those boundaries after the sales meeting ends.
03 / The other architecture: debt
There was a second system to maintain: the company’s finances. Carlyle and Providence completed a take-private transaction in 2007, announced at approximately $1.4 billion. Later, Vector Capital described an overleveraged business whose capital structure made winning new customers harder. Its 2011 unsecured term-loan investment helped repay revolving borrowings and avoid an approaching covenant breach.
This is the awkward fact in the innovation story. A bank choosing a core is also choosing a supplier it expects to depend on. Financial strain can therefore become a product objection, even when the software appeals. Vector’s account points to liquidity and buyer confidence as constraints. Technical merit was only one part of the purchasing decision.
Fiserv separately identified a tax asset with an estimated $165 million net present value.
Fiserv acquired Open Solutions in January 2013. Alongside DNA came CUnify, TotalPlus, Weiland Account Analysis and Raddon Financial Group. The buyer gained technology and financial-institution relationships; the acquired business gained a larger owner. Historical rivals FIS and Jack Henry remained alternatives in the wider core-processing market.
04 / An open platform has a calendar
Today, DNA is sold within Fiserv’s portfolio. Institutions can use hosted or in-house arrangements, with commercial software and services around them. Fiserv’s AppMarket continues the extension idea. “Open” describes integration and customization; buyers still need contracts, connectivity and someone responsible for the resulting system.
The AppMarket FAQ makes that concrete. It describes possible connectivity charges for on-premises platforms, implementation fees for some app categories and usage-related API fees above a stated threshold. Published average app-integration timelines range from 30 days to eight months, depending on category. Those are application connections, not estimates for replacing an entire banking core.
The approach therefore suits institutions prepared to manage integration, data quality and change. If a bank expects an extensible core to remove all migration work or make every outside application instantly compatible, the expectation needs revision. A useful procurement exercise is to price the connections and operating work alongside the core contract.
05 / The unglamorous work that pays
Rally Credit Union offers a concrete example of the work after installation. Working with Fiserv, it introduced automated user-acceptance testing, training, scripts and dashboards for software updates. Fiserv reports that testing a new release fell from 360 hours to 25. The transferable practice is measurable testing discipline. Other institutions would need to establish their own baseline and results.
Customer decisions suggest the original idea still has work to do. Republic Bank selected DNA in March 2025, citing real-time processing and operational efficiency. First Community Credit Union selected it that February, emphasizing integration and commercial capabilities. In August 2026, UW Credit Union chose DNA as its future core for an institution serving 395,000 members.
“DNA gives us a modern, flexible platform to simplify our operations”
Paul Kundert · President and CEO, UW Credit Union · August 2026
Open Solutions’ legacy LinkedIn name now tells visitors to follow Fiserv. It is an unusually literal corporate epilogue. Yet the more interesting continuation sits inside the product: a banking system built to recognize connections between people, businesses and accounts. The company’s independent chapter ended. Institutions are still buying that organizing idea.
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