Jim's Journal

So this is my last day at TIS (though I’m on Vacation) and my journey starts with ACI tomorrow morning with “Challenger Training” – then a week of sessions and keynotes and parties at the ACI Worldwide International Sales Conference.  Big changes for me – going from a small, almost family of a company to an enterprise software development shop.  ACI builds solutions for payments and their customers range from some of the largest financial institutions in the world to some of the largest merchants in the world.  I will have only a handful of national accounts selling their retail banking solutions – the underlying technology for payments including mobile, ATM, Cards, etc.

As I reflect back on Top Image Systems and developing TIS America’s mobile business and strategy it was a fast but power packed twelve months.  I had no less than three managers and three reorganizations; we settled an oppressing lawsuit, raised funds, acquired a US company and the branch grew from 7-55 people. I even had the opportunity to get on stage and present some concept technology – unique and new with Google Glass and Branch Account Opening.

What you see when you open up the camera to take a picture of a bill

The technology got better and better and now is really the standard for mobile image bill pay in the US; the market just doesn’t know it yet. Watch, in the next 12 months you will see many banks go live with that pretty little image capture SDK. More importantly – its the analytical minds building amazing tools to extract data from images – its pretty amazing.

But most of all it was the people – I was sometimes confused, sometimes frustrated, often overwhelmed but mostly blown away by the kindness, openness and incredible “can-do” attitude of the people I worked with. And the experience – a trip to Israel (Finally!) and a chance to interact with almost all of the online and mobile banking vendors.  And my coworkers were from everywhere: Israel, Germany, England, Brazil, I can’t name them all. Wonderful people who care about their work and the people they work with. I won’t miss getting up at 5AM for calls, on second thought I will miss it – because I truly enjoyed those conversations. Why leave – its just time for me; I gave them what I had in my head and heart and hopefully it will move things along. TIS America is a much different organization now, one that has changed. There are good people there – I needed to move on to a better fit for me personally at this point in time.

Isaac and Me under the Kotel (Wester Wall in Jerusalem)

Change – I’ve talked about it to my friends many times – embrace it. Change is the thing that happens when things grow. In nature there can be no growth without it and when things stop growing, they start to die. I’m looking forward to learning new things at ACI, meeting new people, working major accounts and digging in to help people as much as I can.  Along the way – I hope to help my family too – cheers! Now I’m off to the Beverly Hilton for training and rah-rah!