July 2022 Newsletter

Partner Go-Live announcements!

We are excited to announce four new Q2 Accelerator Partners, Ascenum, Covered, CuneXus, and OneDigitalTrust!

Trusted by leading enterprises, OneDigitalTrust is a digital estate & inheritance planning platform which offers a secure, and simple app to let users create legally valid (50 states & DC) documents - will, revocable (living) trust, healthcare and financial powers of attorney among others. Why not empower your customers to complete essential end-of-life inheritance planning to spare surviving family the stress and expense of dealing with endless bureaucracy?

In today’s crowded lending market, consumers seeking a loan have more choices than ever, from national banks to online lenders and finance companies. But when you launch the CuneXus digital storefront, you cut through the competitive noise. Consumers get perpetual lending offers that stay top-of-mind — they’re pre-approved and ready for one-click activation.

Covered Insurance brings an embedded insurance marketplace to FI’s - delivering a personalized shopping experience for your Account Holders. A quick integration with Covered provides access to multiple quotes for multiple products, 30+ insurance carriers and independent, experienced advisors. Our priority is finding the best policy that fits your Account Holders' needs.

Ascenum is a B2B Marketplace for Small to Mid-Size Businesses (SMBs). With Ascenum, FIs become strategic Partners / Advisors for more of their clients’ Defining Business Moments and high-impact service decisions. Ascenum helps FIs grow and expand relationships. Examples of Defining Moments addressed by Marketplace services include access to Private Growth Capital, specialized Working Capital, Tech/Marketing/Finance improvements, and Advisors for Exit Planning and Sale of an SMB’s business.

Visit the digital catalog today to learn more or bring Ascenum, Covered, CuneXus, or OneDigitalTrust to your institution!

GitLab self-hosted transition

Due to a change in GitLab licensing, Q2 is moving to a self-hosted GitLab instance in order to maintain the current SDK cost structure. Click here to request your migration. If you are not moved by October 1st, Q2 will choose the migration date.

There are several benefits of transitioning to a Q2-hosted GitLab structure. The first is to keep the Innovation Studio cost structure the same. Another important feature of this move is fewer logins for our external developers. Now developers will be able to use the same login for the developer portal and GitLab. In addition, there is a security benefit to Q2 hosting GitLab. Lastly, there are several new features and even more we can build for our support team to allow the Innovation Studio Team to better support our external developers.

Credit Union Build-a-thon

On July 22-24, Innovation Studio was a sponsor of CU Build, a weekend build-a-thon for the Symitar community, hosted in Dallas. Ten teams, selected at random from credit union and CUSO participants, competed to build the most innovative application targeted at Credit Union communities. Four teams (including the winning team) used the Q2 Caliper SDK and development environment in their solution. For more details, see our Blog.

Call for new SDK Sub-Committee members

The SDK Sub-Committee of the Q2 User Group is growing. We have several open slots and are looking for new members. If you want to share projects and ideas with other financial institutions and provide feedback to the SDK development team, this is a great opportunity. You can apply for membership by clicking link below.

SDK Sub-Committee Application

SDK News Corner

Local Development Improvements

There is now a dedicated machine for the WebSocket connection for all external developers using local development. The WebSocket used to always connect just to the Shared Dev machine. However, that meant whenever the Shared Development Server went down, everyone developing locally was stuck. Though the Shared Development Server has good uptime (it was only down for about an hour and a half for the whole month of July), the Local Development API was only down once for maintenance for about 5 minutes over the same amount of time.

On top of this, the Innovation Studio team has released the following additional improvements:

• There is now full documentation on every feature for the caliper_admin script
• Mac now can run “memcached” locally
• Mac now has system keychain support for Python https calls
• The caliper_admin script now can autonavigate to the active repo.
• The update command in the caliper_admin script will no longer show errors after completion.
• q2 run now has a -n flag that can override the WebSocket name to allow running multiple copies of the same repository simultaneously

To take advantage of these features please update the caliper_admin script using the built-in update command.

DBObject improvements

There are two new DBObjects:

• HostAccount - provides programmatic access to the Q2_HostAccountData table
• TransactionStatus - interfaces with the Q2_GeneratedTransactionStatus table

The Innovation Studio team also released the following additional improvements for DBObjects:

• CustomerData DBObject has two new methods: get_by_value and get_by_short_name
• UserPropertyData DBObject has a new get_by_group method
• HostTransactionHistoryData DBObject has three new methods: create, update, and delete

Caliper SDK Training

The last Training of the year is coming up on November 15th-17th. The event is three days and gives developers the ability to learn about the SDK environment. The Caliper SDK team gives guided practice to learn industry best practices and practical knowledge about development on the industry-leading Caliper SDK. For more information on the course see the training agenda page.

Additional SDK Improvements

In addition to the bigger changes detailed above, this month's SDK releases also include the following additional improvements.

• Group Mover now works with Corporate Users.
• Setup docs organizational improvement to eliminate the need for separate internal and external setup docs.
• q2 create_extension no longer allows creating extensions that have the same name as a built-in Python library name.
• q2 tecton added stack trace improvements.

Portal News

Beta Testers Request for Wedge Address Configs

The Innovation Studio team has built a method for External Developers to edit Wedge Address Configs directly in the data center. Currently, we are limiting it to specific companies and specific services in the data center. To be added to the beta testing group, please open a support case on q2developer.com.

Custom Development Companies sharing tickets

The Portal has the ability for multiple companies to be assigned to the same ticket, but this feature was not made available to any partners to keep our FI clients anonymous. This feature gives the ability for both Fintechs and FIs to allow Custom Development companies the ability to link tickets with them. Enable this feature from your company settings page.

Collapsible side menu

The left-side navigation now can be collapsed to show only the icons. This provides users with more screen real estate in their use of q2developer.com. To use this feature, look for the button at the bottom of the left-side navigation.

Status page improvements

The status page now will look regularly at the status of the local development API (web socket proxy).

Tecton News

q2-chart-donut

The q2-chart-donut component is a simple donut graph. An example scenario that this component would be good for is showing a user how they are spending their money and in what categories. This could also be used to show investments, donations, or any other data that a donut graph would be good for.

q2-checkbox

The q2-checkbox component now has a description property. This property will add text below the label.

Tecton and Caliper API releases

Tecton and API releases now occur every 4 weeks. Patches can occur at any time, depending on need.  The release schedules are below.

Tecton

August 10 – Tecton 1.15.0

September 7 – Tecton 1.16.0

October 5 – Tecton 1.17.0

November 2 – Tecton 1.18.0

November 30 – Tecton 1.19.0

December 28 – Tecton 1.20.0

Caliper API

August 17

September 14

October 12

November 9

December 7

New Team Members

Solène Sossah joins the Q2 Innovation Studio team from William and Mary where she graduated as a computer science major and math minor.  She believes in Q2’s mission to build strong and diverse communities and hopes to make an impact through her work as a software engineer. Solène is excited to be part of such groundbreaking work and hopes to leverage her skills and experience to add value to the team. Outside of work, Solène enjoys animating, traveling, and exploring new cultures. She loves trying new things such as penny boarding, which she has recently started.

Shannon Sessums graduated from Austin Peay State University with a Bachelor of Computer Science. He has worked with Q2 as an Application Support Engineer helping clients troubleshoot Q2 Platform issues prior to joining the Q2 Partner Success team. He works with the team to ensure our Partners can develop code and have access to assistance throughout their developing process, whether it be helping to troubleshoot their code or to deploy their extensions. In his free time, Shannon tends to indulge in a variety of video games, with a desire to develop his own in the future.

Leanne Hall joined the Innovation Studio team in mid-July coming from Service Delivery. Leanne started with Continuous Delivery 6 years ago and then transferred to Platform Delivery. Most recently, Leanne was a member of the Build Team whose mission is to begin the projects for the net-new contracts and build their initial environment. Leanne hopes to bring this knowledge to Innovation Studio to help customers bridge the gap between their initial implementation and learn all that Q2 can offer as they grow their digital banking experience. Prior to Q2, Leanne has an extensive career beginning in software development and focusing on project management in recent years. As a graduate of The Ohio State University, Leanne is an avid college sports fan and especially enjoys watching Buckeye football in the fall. Leanne is also a Pittsburgh Penguins fan and enjoys seeing the Penguins when they come to Texas to play the Dallas Stars.

Daniel Saenz is joining the Q2 Innovation Studio team after previously working on the Customer Support Team for the past 5 years. Although it was difficult to leave his position as a Senior on the team, mentoring new members, and helping existing members, the new challenges presented were too exciting to pass up. Outside of work, Daniel enjoys playing Ice Hockey and Rucking. He is currently planning his wedding for October.

Latest Releases

Caliper SDK (Python) 2.140.0 - CHANGELOG

Tecton SDK (Javascript) 1.14.0 - CHANGELOG

Marketplace (Python) 0.8.5 - CHANGELOG

Caliper API (Python) 1.12.1 - CHANGELOG