ODI Overview

Operational Data Interchange (ODI) is a centralized service that streamlines the movement of bulk, batch data between providers and consumers, ensuring consistency, reliability, and reduced effort across teams. At a high level, ODI receives data from one or more providers, processes it, and prepares it for consumers in a standardized format.

ODI replaces a decentralized, provider‑managed model with a unified processing layer. Historically, providers were responsible for building and maintaining custom extraction paths for each consumer, often resulting in inconsistent data formats and redundant engineering effort. By serving as a central hub for data ingestion, storage, and delivery, ODI enforces uniform standards and accelerates downstream availability.

What is ODI?

ODI is a data handler for various providers, including Jack Henry’s SilverLake, CIF 20/20, and Core Director banking cores. It was originally designed as a solution for providing multiple consumers with the data they need while offloading processing stress from the core systems. This data aggregation and distribution design allows many systems to consume different subsets of data, based on a single set of extract files from the core.

ODI provides a standardized interface that allows a single consumer product to easily onboard new Jack Henry institutions using the same dataset across all instances. This “cookie‑cutter” approach streamlines installation and support considerations and eliminates some of the guesswork when onboarding new institutions.

ODI is a great option to move data from one provider to multiple consumers; however there are some things ODI is not intended for.

ODI is not:

• A data warehouse – ODI does not store a complete history of data, only a current snapshot as determined by settings at the data provider level.
• Online storage for the consumer – Data consumers must copy subscribed data into their own application and process from there.
• Real-time data – ODI is a batch system, and most batch data will only be refreshed only once per day. For real time data, we offer our jXchange product.
• A data normalizer – ODI does not modify, alter, or normalize data received. It sends data to the consumer as it is recorded in the provider system.
• A data preloader - ODI cannot be configured to assist with one- or multi-time preloading of data from a selected time period.

OFI (Operational File Integration)

Another feature of ODI is Operational File Integration (OFI). Like ODI, OFI serves to provide access to other products’ data without having to contact that provider directly, but allows the provider and consumer to share data in a format not ingestible by ODI.

Using OFI, a provider can make data available in any file format it chooses and pass that data file to ODI with the intent of the ODI system then making it available to one or more consumers. In this manner, ODI becomes a pass-through for data it cannot easily handle via the SQL database.

There are a few additional features of OFI that make it useful in a wide range of applications. These features are contained in the *.ofi control file that must accompany the actual provider data file. First, the provider has the option of naming the consumers that are to receive the data file. The consumers must already be configured to receive the file, but this allows the provider some ability to customize the data for specific consumers. Second, the control file can contain a ticket ID that can be used by the provider and consumer to correlate the data as a response to some external request process not made via ODI. The ticket ID is revealed to the consumer as part of the EES event sent as notification of the file’s availability. In this manner, ODI is operating as a bulk response mechanism.

Please keep in mind that the consumer must understand how to read the file structure sent by the provider, and any changes made in that format create a maintenance event for the consumer developers. As a rule, any data that can be made to fit the regular ODI contracts should, and only specially formatted information should be handled via OFI.

Next Steps

Please review the Getting Started with ODI section of this portal to further review the ODI product and see how to start working with ODI.