Despite its perks, being the boss can be tough – constant meetings, endless emails, juggling projects and deadlines with the people and personalities on your team, all while trying to actually get that whole “work” thing done. The job description gets even tougher when you’re tasked with breathing change and innovation into an industry not known as part of the technological avant-garde.
For CTO of Plano-based Alkami Technologies, Mark Haney, this is more of a part of daily life rather than a job description. And late last month, he and the rest of the team at Alkami were recognized for the work the company is doing to bring banking into the digital age.
“I’m much more of a precise, structured and disciplined CTO... for me, it’s how do we put a structure in place so that every development team has empowerment and creativity at their disposal... to solve the biggest problems our clients put forward to them,” Haney said. “We’ve been growing quite rapidly, and if you look at the trend, these financial institutions are worried about their online presence.”
On their home turf, Haney and Alkami were awarded the Corporate CTO Award at the Tech Titans Annual Awards Gala at the Renaissance Dallas at Plano Legacy West on Aug. 23. In addition to recognizing CTOs who show strong leadership abilities in fostering new tech growth, the award also goes to CTOs who have done that within their own company – a challenge for anyone who knows what it’s like to challenge the status quo.
For Haney and Alkami, this meant the implementation of microservices and an automated release engineering pipeline. Alkami provides software platforms for financial institutions. What makes the company different, and what the decision-makers at Tech Titans decided, is the way it operates.
What separates Alkami from other fintech platforms is a combination of its microservices, a notion etched into the company’s corporate structure that flips tradition on its head. Instead of putting out an entire set of code to perform every function, Alkami puts out a single app for each client that fits into their broader ecosystem of apps. The other differentiator – a pipeline that allows the company to roll out those individual codes with automation technology, without the client companies even noticing.
“I think those two concepts are kind of the corner stone of the innovation [at Alkami] in the last few years,” Haney said.
Haney credits this set up for a positive corporate culture and for a smoother functioning operation. Alkami’s software, used by more than 130 different financial institutions and 250 different integration partners, can be plugged in quickly and with little downtime, due to the coding set up which speeds up implementation and upgrade time by segmenting off its code and workforce. Haney said that release updates that use to take between 4-5 hours, now take half that time.
“For me, it all gets back to the bottom line and what the financial institutions are trying to do... it has got to make business sense and it’s got to drive a return to that institution,” Haney said. “If you’re not out developing and evaluating... someone else will, and they’ll come in and offer a product that’s faster more engaging.”
According to Haney, the company has been experiencing about 40 percent growth per year, translating to about 30-40 new clients per year. Crunchbase.com says Alkami has raised over $228 million, and while that number is likely to be off, the company raised about $18.3 million (with a large sum coming from General Atlantic and Austin-based S3 Ventures) in its June Series C round, according to filings with the SEC.
"If you’re not out developing and evaluating... someone else will, and they’ll come in and offer a product that’s faster more engaging."
Haney said that with the new influx of cash, the company intends to expand its business banking platform and expand into the banking market; currently, a large portion of Alkami’s business comes from the credit union industry.
“There’s a lot of tech for tech’s sake, but for me it’s got to be about the bottom line and give our clients an advantage,” Haney said.
