Every successful payment leaves a trail of work that must be finished accurately, on time, and without interruption. Reconciliation, settlement, fees, and disputes form the quiet backbone of electronic commerce. When these processes are slow or fragmented, trust erodes and costs rise. When they are handled with precision, institutions gain control, clarity, and the freedom to focus on growth.
BHMI has dedicated itself to that quiet backbone for decades. The company builds specialized software for the back-office processing of electronic payment transactions. Its flagship offering, the Concourse Financial Software Suite®, supports credit, debit, prepaid, and real-time account-to-account payments across ATMs, point-of-sale systems, and mobile channels. Concourse provides continuous real-time data access, automated reconciliation, settlement, fee assessment, and dispute management. Its continuous-processing architecture and configurable rules engine allow organizations to adapt as payment methods and regulations change.
The suite consists of five modules: Concourse – Core™, Concourse – Reconciliation™, Concourse – Extended Settlement™, Concourse – Fees & Commissions™, and Concourse – Disputes™ that can be licensed individually or together. Each module shares the same transaction life-cycle linkage, keeping data consistent from authorization through final settlement and any later dispute. All development, testing, implementation, and support are performed by BHMI’s own team at its Software Development Center in the United States. That direct ownership has produced systems known for continuous availability, high scalability, and proven reliability.
For payment institutions that need their back-office operations to remain accurate, adaptable, and under firm control, BHMI offers software refined by decades of focused work and built to deliver lasting value.
At CIO Bulletin, we had the distinct honor of speaking with Michael E. Meeks, CTO of BHMI. He shared valuable insights into how, through decades of technological change, the company has remained steadfast in its core purpose: creating software that is continuously available, highly scalable, exceptionally reliable, and built to deliver lasting value to its clients.
A Vision Takes Root: Where BHMI’s Journey Began
BHMI’s foundation was built on a clear belief: exceptional technology begins with exceptional people. In 1986, Dr. Jack T. Baldwin, Dr. Lynne J. Baldwin, and Michael E. Meeks co-founded the company with a vision to build a premier team of experts dedicated to designing, developing, and supporting enterprise software applications. That founding vision was not simply about creating technology; it was about building expertise that businesses could rely on when their most critical operations depended on it.
Over the years, that early ambition became the foundation for BHMI’s reputation for technical excellence, reliability, and innovation. As the company grew and its work took on greater importance for its clients, its focus became increasingly defined. Meeks reflects on those early days and the thinking that ultimately led BHMI to specialize in the back-office processing of electronic payments.
“When we opened BHMI’s doors 40 years ago, we had a vision to assemble a talented team of technologists that knew how to build enterprise, real-time software. Our vision took off as the team grew, and big projects started to happen.”
BHMI quickly established a strong reputation, earning the trust of companies to develop software solutions essential to their business success. Given the critical nature of these applications, the solutions BHMI designed were continuously available, highly scalable, and exceptionally reliable.
That reputation led to a deliberate choice: rather than build general-purpose enterprise software, BHMI began focusing specifically on the back-office processing of electronic payments. That focus resulted in the creation of the Concourse Financial Software Suite®. Four decades later, BHMI remains one of the few companies building software exclusively for this part of the payments industry.
Concourse Financial Software Suite: One Platform for Every Payment Journey
BHMI’s deep specialization in payment operations has given it a clear understanding of what organizations need beyond the transaction itself. The company has built that expertise into Concourse, a modular platform designed to bring essential back-office functions together while giving clients the flexibility to choose what they need and expand as their requirements evolve. For Meeks, that combination of capability, flexibility, and connected data is central to the platform’s value.
The Concourse Financial Software Suite is a modular payments back-office platform designed to help organizations manage the increasingly complex lifecycle of electronic payments. Concourse provides the flexibility to deploy the capabilities an organization needs today while providing a foundation that can evolve as payment volumes, channels, and business requirements change.
The Concourse suite includes the following modules:
Concourse – Core™ provides the foundational functionality used by every other module, including a centralized transaction repository, a configurable rules engine, security and data access controls, and a user-friendly browser-based interface.
Concourse – Reconciliation™ automatically loads and matches transaction data from external sources, such as card and debit networks, giving organizations continuous visibility into reconciliation status, net positions, and the specific reasons for any discrepancies.
Concourse – Fees & Commissions™ automates complex fee calculations and gives companies the flexibility to calculate any type of fee or commission, including flat, tiered, or volume-based pricing, on any type of electronic payment transaction.
Concourse – Disputes™ provides workflow-driven management of chargebacks, representments, and arbitration, with built-in support for network compliance requirements and required approvals.
Concourse – Extended Settlement™ supports complex settlement requirements across payment types, currencies, and standards, and gives organizations near-real-time visibility into settlement activity.
What differentiates Concourse is the architecture connecting these capabilities. Every module reads from and writes to the same centralized transaction repository, so a transaction’s full lifecycle stays linked and visible in one place rather than scattered across disconnected applications.
Built for Complexity, Connected by Design
Payment back-office operations rarely struggle with just one problem. Transaction volumes continue to grow, payment methods multiply, standards evolve, and organizations often find themselves relying on systems that were built at different times for different purposes. The challenge is not simply processing more payments; it is keeping every part of the payment lifecycle connected, visible, and manageable.
BHMI built Concourse with that reality in mind. Its architecture brings together the functions that sit at the heart of payment operations while giving organizations the flexibility to modernize without having to replace everything at once.
“What makes Concourse uniquely positioned is that it was designed specifically to address the operational complexity of modern payments.”
Many organizations are trying to manage growing transaction volumes, new messaging standards, increasingly complex reconciliation and settlement requirements, and higher expectations for real-time visibility, often across a collection of legacy and disconnected systems. Concourse was built to bring those critical functions together.
At the core of the platform is a continuous processing architecture and a centralized transaction repository, which provide real-time access to transaction data and enable organizations to manage the payment lifecycle with greater visibility and control. Its configurable rules engine also allows clients to adapt processing and business logic as their requirements change, without having to continually develop entirely new systems.
That ability to adapt is complemented by the platform’s modular architecture. Organizations can address specific challenges, such as reconciliation, fee assessment, disputes management, or settlement processing while maintaining a common platform and data foundation. This allows them to modernize incrementally rather than undertake a disruptive, all-at-once replacement of their payments back-office infrastructure.
As Meeks puts it, the real differentiator is not any single capability, but the way the platform brings them together:
“Ultimately, Concourse's unique value is its combination of real-time processing, centralized data, configurable business rules, modularity, and deep payment-industry functionality.”
It gives organizations a way to modernize the back office while preserving the flexibility and stability required to support mission-critical payment operations.
Building for the Real-Time Era
The move toward real-time payments is changing more than the speed at which money moves. It is also raising the standard for everything that happens after a transaction is initiated. Reconciliation, settlement, fees, disputes, and data visibility all need to keep pace, yet many organizations continue to operate with back-office systems built around older, batch-oriented models.
BHMI sees this as a critical part of the real-time payments transition. Its approach focuses on strengthening the operational foundation behind faster payments, helping organizations modernize without losing the stability and control their payment environments demand.
“BHMI helps organizations transition to a real-time future by modernizing the payments back office, an area that is often overlooked but essential for supporting faster payments and increasing transaction volumes,” says Meeks.
While front-end payment experiences continue to evolve, many organizations still rely on fragmented, batch-oriented systems that create delays, manual processes, and limited visibility into transaction data.
Concourse supports both ISO 8583 and ISO 20022 message formats, so organizations can integrate new payment rails and messaging standards without disrupting existing operations. Incoming files are loaded into a shared transaction repository, which keeps reconciliation, settlement, fees, and disputes processing working from current data rather than waiting on end-of-day batch cycles.
That foundation also gives organizations flexibility in how they deploy it. Concourse can run on premise in a client's data center or in a private or public cloud environment, so organizations can modernize their back office at a pace and in an environment that fits their broader technology strategy.
Ultimately, BHMI enables payment organizations to move beyond traditional batch-based processing models and build a scalable, agile back-office foundation that supports payments today while preparing for future innovation.
Shaping What’s Next in Payment Operations
The most meaningful innovations are not always the ones that change what customers see. Sometimes, their greatest impact is found in the systems working quietly behind the scenes, bringing together information that was once scattered, giving teams a clearer view of what is happening, and making complex operations easier to manage.
That philosophy is central to Concourse. Its ability to connect the different stages of a transaction lifecycle reflects BHMI’s long-standing understanding of what payment organizations need from their back-office technology. More than a collection of individual capabilities, the platform brings those functions together around the transaction itself, creating a unified view that can support faster, more informed decisions.
For Meeks, this connected approach represents one of Concourse’s most meaningful contributions to the industry. As he explains:
“There are many innovations within Concourse that have made a meaningful difference for payment organizations, but the one with the broadest impact is the transaction lifecycle linkage model at the center of the platform.”
Historically, many back-office payment processes have been built around batch processing and disconnected systems, so an organization might have separate views of a transaction's authorization, reconciliation and settlement status, allocated fees, and any dispute filed against it. Understanding the full story required manually piecing those views together.
Concourse links all related activities such as the authorization detail, network activity, settlement entries, reconciliation results, fees, and disputes, back to the same underlying transaction. This allows the operations staff to see the complete picture from a single screen rather than searching across systems. That becomes increasingly important as faster payments are raising the bar on how quickly the back office needs to perform.
It is this ability to connect the complete transaction story that gives the platform its distinctive value. And after decades spent working exclusively on payment back-office challenges, BHMI has continued refining that capability with the changing needs of the industry in mind.
“For over two decades, BHMI has focused exclusively on solving these back-office challenges, and that depth of experience continues to shape how Concourse evolves, helping shift the payments back office from a largely reactive, batch-oriented function into a proactive, data-driven operation that gives organizations the flexibility to support new payment methods and business models in the future,” concludes Meeks.
The Visionary Leader Behind BHMI’s Success
Michael E. Meeks is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at BHMI and is responsible for strategic technical development direction, software development standards, and software management procedures and tools for BHMI’s cross-platform development environment. Michael has been a partner at BHMI since 1987. Before joining the company, he was a senior systems engineer at a large financial software firm. Michael has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and his background includes database and object-oriented design, system performance and sizing, and the design and development of large distributed systems.
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