Core Banking Integration into SOA

Project summary Implementation of SOA architecture at medium US-based bank with IMB WebSphere family of tools and technologies
Customer Medium bank serving Eastern US
Project geography USA
Project objective Implement SOA architecture, tools, and governance to address the following product and customer management concerns:
  • Provide more efficient and flexible customer-centric offerings that are aimed at making long-term customer relationships
  • Provide channel-agnostic promotional offers.
  • Offer products that are personalized to meet customer needs.
  • Extend existing delivery channels and offer new channels for communication

Automate key back office processes to align with front office improvements

Project highlights
  • Customer’s current core systems infrastructure was too complex and did not support business initiatives effectively.
  • Maintaining interfaces among disparate systems was a major challenge. Additionally, maintaining multiple account opening systems and applications across product lines and channels is the single most important cost challenge, accounting for over 25% bank’s total processing costs.
  • A lack of an enterprise-wide standard workflows resulted in duplication of effort across product lines and channels.

This resulted in specific product and customer management challenges:

Customer record challenges

  • The customer and product data are supported by individual line-of-business applications
  • Disparate systems hold duplicated data is frequently inconsistent across the lines-of-business.
  • Most systems hold little historical customer account information.

Product and services challenges

  • Different processes are used to identify existing customers when the customer uses different channels.
  • Promotional offers are not tailored to a customer’s profile, which results in offers that are often unsuitable. Customers also do not understand why promotions are not consistent across channels.
  • It is difficult to initiate a transaction in one channel and then continue it in another.
  • There is no global product catalog available.

Systems challenges

  • Business requirements are not effectively supported by the existing system and processes. Processes are line-of-business specific. Customer and product information is inconsistent, and there is a dependence on manual efforts.
  • The IT systems that support JKHL Bank’s various channels and lines-of-business are all separate  systems with little or no integration

There is an increasing burden on JKHL Bank to maintain complex legacy applications. Staff  supporting legacy systems carry a significant knowledge base with them, and if they leave the knowledge goes with them.

Project description Being technical project in nature, the project consisted of several phases with multiple new technologies being acquired and deployed in waves.

Customer mandated a strong Web services architecture that consisted of standardized business functions to access back office applications, such as Customer Information Systems (CIS) and consumer loans, that resided in enterprise information systems.

As a result, the following architectural points were addressed:

Reuse of legacy systems

  • Service-enable existing assets using indirect exposure – one example is publishing of back office application (an application running in CICS Transaction Server) as an SOA service through a Java-based adapter.

Application connectivity

  • Web services standards

Process

  • Business process management

Information

  • Master data management
  • Enterprise content management
  • Business intelligence

Systems end-users

  • Process portal
  • Rich Web based applications
  • integrated desktop capability that allows all disparate desktop business applications to be integrated into a composite application

SOA was implemented with IBM WebSphere technologies:

  • IBM WebSphere Message Broker
  • IBM WebSphere Process Server
  • IBM WebSphere Application Server