CSI Acquires Hawthorn River to Improve Loan Processing

FinTech CSI has acquired banking software firm Hawthorn River to enhance the loan origination capabilities of CSI customers. 

This acquisition will add Hawthorn River’s single-platform loan origination system designed for community banks to CSI’s platform. which includes core processing, digital banking, payments, fraud and compliance, and cybersecurity, the companies said in a Monday (Dec. 18) press release. 

“We’ve made it our mission at CSI not just to advocate for community banks, but to do everything in our power to deliver technologies that solve their most important problems and empower them to compete and scale,” David Culbertson, CEO and president of CSI, said in the release. “Our acquisition of Hawthorn River is the latest step in addressing those needs.” 

Hawthorn River can service all loan types within one platform, enabling community banks to handle loans for both consumer and commercial accounts through the platform, according to the release. 

With the acquisition of the company, CSI will also be able to deliver single-point loan origination solutions to non-CSI community banks through strategic channel partnerships and application programming interface (API) integrations with other technology and service providers, the release said. 

The acquisition follows a successful commercial partnership between the two organizations, in which Hawthorn River’s solution was leveraged within CSI’s platform, and strengthens their existing technical integration, per the release. 

“We couldn’t have found a better partner to scale our loan origination technology and get it into the hands of more community bankers who need it,” Jon Rigsby, who founded Hawthorn River with Wayne Ferrell in 2018, said in the release. 

In another recent development, CSI partnered with treasury management FinTech Dragonfly Financial Technologies in October, saying this collaboration will provide CSI customers with enterprise-level business banking solutions. 

The partnership will enable more than 20 types of automated clearing house (ACH) transactions, positive pay and reverse positive pay services, sweep accounts, and expanded domestic and international wire functionality. 

In March, CSI teamed up with Hawk:AI to add that company’s anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud prevention technology to CSI’s latest end-to-end FinTech and RegTech products. 

This partnership will help firms reduce human error and the number of hours employees spend manually monitoring fraud and money laundering.