Our History
X9Ware — Why choose us? The X9Ware story and why you should choose us as your solution provider.
X9Ware was founded in 2012 with the idea that the existing x9.37 check image tools were inadequate. Our goal at that time was to make common tasks easier and the most complex tasks possible. We wanted to build tools that would provide more extensive validation capabilities with more advanced functions that would allow x9.37 files to be easily created, modified, validated, sanitized, and merged. All of these goals were met with the introduction of our X9Assist desktop product in 2012. Since that date, we have continued to implement ongoing enhancements, making our tools better, and expanding into new product areas. This expansion has included:
- Additional x9.37 desktop tools (X9Vision and X9Validator).
- Our X9Utilities command line tool which bring many of our X9Assist functions into a batch environment that can be run from scripts or invoked from application programs. This includes our “-write” function which can create output x9.37 files from simple CSV and images. This is a parameter driven process which is capable of constructed x9.37 files in all of the variants that are needed by financial institutions and processors.
- Our SDK which is the core of our technical environment. All of our products are built on top of the SDK, which allows our customers to take advantage of all of our tools through the documented APIs. We not only provide sample programs, but also provide the complete X9Utilities source code which allows customers to see how we have leveraged the SDK to do specific tasks in a production ready environment.
- Additional file type dialects (ACH and CPA005) which brings our capabilities to other environments.
Our Customers
We understand how difficult the process of choosing a software product can be. There are a lot of variables that enter into the decision. You need a product that meets your current and future business needs, provides excellent support, is easy to install and operate, and is competitively priced. We firmly believe that X9Ware products excels in all of these areas. Let us tell you why.
X9Ware was a later entry into a mature marketplace for x9.37 and ACH based tools. By very definition, this means that the space was already very crowded, and that virtually all of our target customers had already chosen their vendors. Why did we enter such a difficult situation? The answer is quite simply that we had passion about our solutions, and we knew that we could provide better tools than those offered by those the competitors. All of our early customers already had x9.37 tools. Every one of them choose X9Ware because our tools brought more advanced capabilities. We now have over 60% of the top twenty financial institutions in North America using our products, and that percentage continues to grow. These organizations have complex evaluation requirements, but they continue to choose our tools. More importantly, once they become a customer, they stay with us.
When you choose X9Ware as your supplier, you are getting our industry knowledge. We do not sell a portfolio of software products that we have bought from others. We are the developers, we understand the products, and we will work directly with you to ensure your success.
Unlike many of our competitors, our products continue to be substantially enhanced to meet the ongoing needs of our customer base. We recognize that all software products can be improved. We listen closely to our customers and incorporate their feedback into upcoming releases. We also realize that you do not want licensing servers that are difficult to use and that will complicate your day-to-day support environment.
X9Ware firmly believes that our products have more functionality than anything else you will find in the marketplace today. This includes our more complex functions such as search/replace, scrub (removing customer PII), merge, and our make/generate process that creates files from Excel spreadsheets. Our products make the most difficult possible and dramatically improve your productivity.
We have a very diverse customer base that includes National Banks, Regional Banks, Credit Unions, FinTechs, Check Processors, Aggregators, Lock Box Processors, Mobile Processors, Government Entities, and many Commercial Businesses that use our products to build files to send to their banks. We review every new customer opportunity to fully understand the requirements. We do not enter into a potential new relationship unless we are 100% convinced that we can meet your needs and ensure your success.
Our Story
X9Assist was originally designed to tackle the problem of creating x9.37 test files. In those early days of check image, there was quite literally no easy way to construct a test file. This task most often consisted of using a proof machine to prepare test documents, which were then captured using an image sorter. This process was manually intensive, error prone, and typically took several days to complete. X9Ware addressed this issue through the development of Make/Generate, which creates x9.37 test files from Excel spreadsheet data. Not only does not eliminate all of the manual work, but it also allows the creation of use case definitions (the spreadsheets) to be distributed throughout the organization. This means that each operational area can enter their own use cases and provide them to a centralized area which aggregates them and provides overall control of test data preparation. With the introduction of X9Assist Image Print, this same workflow is being used to create MICR test documents (which need to be captured) for ATM capture, branch capture, mobile capture, remote deposit capture, and centralized item processing. In these organizations, Make/Generate has become the common way to create all test files, regardless of whether they are image or print based.
X9Ware also felt that there should be better ways to create test files from production level data. In support of that, we designed and implemented our Scrub process which applies sanitization rules to production data to manufacture test image files. Scrub has many options that allow varying levels of customer data to be obliterated to protect customer sensitive data. This includes account numbers on the MICR line (where new check images will be drawn from templates) or the as well as portions his process, but also the ability to mask certain areas on checks to redact common blocks where the customer might write potentially sensitive information. Scrub can be used to satisfy the need to create high volume test data while meeting the Audit requirement of not using production data in the test environment.
Export is another area where we have spent a lot of time. The most common need for an x9.37 data exporter is to provide access to the item record fields and the check images. However, X9Ware has taken this to another level and is providing more options and flexibility to meet customer specific requirements by building the data parsing into our export process, this allowing customer applications to more on a logical data process where items and addendums have been parsed into fixed fields. This makes the data much easier to access. X9Ware also allows export to be run at a folder level, allowing a single export to run against hundreds or even thousands of files. We have been amazed to hear how customers have used our export tools to perform data migrations from one archive to another. We provide the tools needs to make the most complex conversions both easy and possible.
X9Ware has spent a lot of time on our X9Utilities product, which is command line. Instead of taking the approach of marketing standalone tools that each perform only one task, we have used the approach of building a single batch tool that performs all batch oriented tasks that we offer. This design allows our customers to gain access to more tools as we develop and implement X9Utilities enhancements. Examples are the additions of merge and compare to X9Utilities, which are both powerful functions and are commonly needed by test automation teams.
Another area of substantial X9Ware development work has been the ability to create x9.37 files in a generic fashion. These tools are targeted to fill a gap in the industry which resulted from the various x9.37 implementations that have been chosen by financial institutions and third party processors. The result is our x9writer technology, which is available in both X9Utilities and the SDK. X9Writer uses an XML parameter file to format x9.37 files based on a large number of options that exist in the industry. This includes the x9 standard to be applied, credit format, credit location, population of trailer totals, direction as to how credits impact trailer totals, and many field level formatting parameters. Files can be created with varying batch sizes and even as single item deposits when needed. These tools can be invoked from any environment (Java, .Net, Perl, batch scripts, schedulers, etc). If your primary requirement is to create/export x9 files, then either our X9Utilities or SDK products will do that equally as well. These tools are the most flexible that you will find in the marketplace today.
Beyond all of this, X9Ware is the first vendor (and we think the only vendor) to use a common user interface with a common set of tools to support both x9 and ach files. These very different file formats are supported from a single EXE and can be licensed separately or together, depending on your needs.