The application landscape in core banking is broad and SOA has been successful in turning many of the processes in this domain into agile and reliable services. Examples of
these include, but are not limited to, Customer Acquisition and Accounts Processing, Credit Card Processing, Consumer Loans, Mortgage Loans and Underwriting, Deposit and Payment Processing, Bill Paying, Cash Management, Collateral Administration, Securities, Taxation, Treasury, and more.
To support multiple distribution channels a layer of SOA services linked to multiple back end systems can be composed or aggregated to support opening and maintenance of customer accounts as a one stop service through a common interface. In this case, advantages not only include reduced costs, simplified maintenance, and increased revenue, but also customer retention and enhanced customer relationships. With SOA,
Loan Origination Systems can be more tightly integrated to the core banking system,
Allowing Loan Officers to deliver products and offers that are better suited to borrowers
in real time, increasing loan closures and maximizing customer satisfaction. Automated
Loan Underwriting can provide Customer Service Representatives with a single automated advisory service to better handle product and service complexities, allowing
them to shift from transaction processing tasks to exception management for higher productivity and better customer experience. Credit Card Divisions can increase revenue and profit margins more accurately along with smarter and more targeted risk assessment and offer qualifications. With SOA, business rules represent standard operating procedures, and enforce accurate interpretation of guidelines across divisions and geographical locations. Staff hours can be better streamlined, while allowing a focus on exceptions rather than on standard transaction handling.
Datapro’s aproach towards making its e-IBS® Core Banking System SOA Enabled
For the past couple of years Datapro has been actively working with IBM in making SOA enabled its “e-IBS® Core Banking
System”. We initiated the project by getting the technology patterns, software framework, roles and responsibilities, and governance model well defined. We then began our work with simple services to illustrate the benefits of the approach and to gain support from colleagues in various business areas. |
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| The model has remained consistent and the costs to run our SOA solutions have remained fairly constant while scaling up and scaling out. Today, the e-IBS® Core Banking System incorporates standard SOA-enabled interfaces |
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which allows it to interact and collaborate with a variety of vendors, services and business channels.
“Having to deal with an increasing diversity of customers and vendors, each with complex and unique interfacing and collaboration requirements, motivated us to seek for solutions that would allow us to keep up pace with the greater demands and integration challenges these posed to our business and technology infrastructure. We soon realized that a Service Oriented enablement of our system was the best approach to address the challenges we were facing. SOA formed the underpinning of the platform transformation we needed; an efficient way to align the core business functionality with where it was needed to quickly respond to market changes, while facilitating incremental adoption, both economically and technically, of consumable shared and reusable services, greater adaptability and maintainability, and greater deployment flexibility. Our approach turned out to be similar to that taken by Datapro in making their e-IBS® Core Banking System SOA-enabled”, said Mr. Ramon Arenas, Senior Manager of Software Engineering at CorpBanca in Chile.
In summary, SOA is here to stay. We are committed to it and it has been a great success
not only in the banking industry but in a broad range of other domains. There are many
approaches with which to implement SOA. Whatever approach you choose, it should be
a top down methodology. That is, from business requirements down to technology and not the other way around.
If you already support SOA in your environment, stick with it. If you have not started yet, start small and with basic services you know will get used, especially those where high traffic demands is expected. Adopt a strong SOA leadership and robust technology patterns. Choose your technology partners carefully and clearly outline your governance model. This will surely put you in the path to a successful SOA environment. |
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