Implementation engagement
Bookend is delivered with a professional-services engagement, not downloaded and configured alone. Every bank runs the same signed release, and the engagement fits it to your documents, approval record, core, credit policy and controls, proves it on your own historical closings, and hands it over with what your auditors expect.
The path has four parts: a free Closing Workflow Review, a paid pilot, a four-week implementation, and hypercare followed by ongoing support.
1. Closing Workflow Review
Section titled “1. Closing Workflow Review”Free, 45 minutes, with your head of loan operations and a closing specialist.
Together we map the path from approval to documents to execution to boarding to funding, count the touches and hours at each step, and pull three recent boarding exceptions. You keep a one-page Closing Error and Capacity Map whether or not you go further. The follow-up lists what the implementation would need from you, so an engagement can start moving on day one.
2. Pilot on your next 20 closings
Section titled “2. Pilot on your next 20 closings”Paid. Bookend runs on your next 20 closings, using your packages and your approval records, redacted if you prefer. The pilot uses boarding files only and never writes to your core. Findings are reviewed with your specialists each week, and the pilot report, covering accuracy and exceptions on your real packages, is the basis for the implementation decision.
3. The four-week implementation
Section titled “3. The four-week implementation”Five stages, each with a written exit condition.
| Stage | When | Who from the bank | What happens | Done when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Discovery | Week 1 | Loan operations, IT and infrastructure, information security, core administrator | Document sources (documentation system variants and counsel forms), the approval record (LAR) format, boarding practice and core fields, the wire process, roles and segregation of duties, network, VM, database, TLS and mail decisions. The vendor-risk questionnaire is answered. | A signed configuration workbook and the environment request. |
| 2. Install and enablement | Week 1 | IT and infrastructure, information security, Jack Henry liaison | The host is provisioned to the install runbook, the release is verified and started, TLS is set up at your edge, the onboarding wizard is completed with your mail relay and database, and roles are created. jXchange enablement is requested through the Jack Henry Vendor Integration Program (VIP), with boarding files as the interim path. | Readiness checks green, mail and core connection tests passed, security sign-off on the install. |
| 3. Configure and map | Week 2 | Loan operations subject-matter expert, core administrator | A LAR profile for your approval format. A core field map version that maps each extracted term to your core’s field and format. Execution templates for your document set, and your own forms taught by pointing at values on one example. Rule tolerances, reason codes, justification policy and document retention set to your credit policy. | Every canonical field maps, and a preview boards a real loan cleanly. |
| 4. Parallel run | Week 3 | Closing specialists, loan operations manager | 20 to 30 historical closings processed alongside your existing process. Accuracy by field type, findings compared against known outcomes, and rule tuning. Where your documents differ from the shipped templates, a specialist corrects the source on the page and Bookend learns the form. | An accuracy report you accept, and specialists working the workstation on their own. |
| 5. Train and go live | Week 4 | All roles, internal audit and compliance | Role-based training. Go-live with human approval on every loan, which never changes. The evidence packet walked through with internal audit and compliance, the validation pack filed in your model-risk inventory, and nightly backup and upgrade cadence in place. | First production loans sealed, audit accepts the packet, and support handover is complete. |
Ready at kickoff
Section titled “Ready at kickoff”Four weeks assumes three things are in place on day one:
- the host, database and TLS provisioned to the install runbook;
- 20 to 30 recent closings with their approval records gathered for the parallel run;
- a date on the vendor-risk committee calendar.
Install follows a runbook, mapping and templates are data, and the parallel run processes the closings in an afternoon. Most of the week is your specialists reviewing findings.
jXchange enablement runs in parallel
Section titled “jXchange enablement runs in parallel”Enablement through VIP starts in stage 2 and can take longer than the engagement. Go-live does not wait for it: you go live on boarding files, and switching to jXchange when enablement completes is a settings change. The field map, the two-phase approval and the evidence packet are the same on both paths.
4. Hypercare and support
Section titled “4. Hypercare and support”Hypercare. For four weeks after go-live, we review findings and overrides with your loan operations manager each week, adjust thresholds, and apply the first release together.
Support. After hypercare you choose one of two levels:
| Level | What it includes |
|---|---|
| Standard | Business hours, ticketed, with release notes and a validation pack for every release. |
| Premium | A named engineer, 4-hour response, help deploying releases, and an annual examiner-readiness review. |
Updates are part of the license. Releases are signed bundles you pull on your own change-control schedule, and staying within one minor release of current is a condition of support.
5. What professional services does not do
Section titled “5. What professional services does not do”Professional services never changes the software for one bank. Everything in the engagement is configuration, mapping, tuning and proof inside the shipped release. Field maps, LAR profiles, execution templates, taught document templates, tolerances and reason codes are versioned data in your own database, previewed before they go live and carried forward through every release.
If your documents or your core need something the release cannot express, it becomes a product change for every bank, not a fork you would then be stuck on. That is what keeps upgrades routine and the validation pack meaningful.
6. Cores
Section titled “6. Cores”Bookend starts with Jack Henry banks: SilverLake, CIF 20/20 and Core Director, boarding through jXchange once VIP enablement completes, with boarding files as the interim path. Boarding files are also the permanent path for any core that takes a file, so a bank on another core can use Bookend today. The adapter contract is core-agnostic, and additional core adapters are in development as products rather than one-off projects.