Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives by Kyle Gabhart

Author:Kyle Gabhart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

Banking and Investments

Service orientation took root in banks and brokerages long before it was a mainstream, well-defined concept. Common themes include seamless access to data and business logic that was previously locked away in silos, reuse of systems and capabilities across business units, and service orientation of business processes to enable agility.

Consider the following cases of service orientation:• Improved business processes. Synovus, a regional bank in the south-eastern part of the United States with about $33 billion in assets, took a service oriented approach to its Internet banking and technology modernization initiatives.7 It automated and streamlined nearly 30 manual processes using SOA and business process management (BPM) and did so under a very aggressive timeline. Harley-Davidson Financial Services, the financial services arm of Harley, focused their SOA initiative on building services around key business processes.8 The emphasis was on loose coupling to provide the flexibility to change one part of a process without touching the other parts. To catch the spring marketing season, the processes of checking a potential buyer’s credit and approving a loan to purchase a motorcycle are merged into a fluid, accelerated business process. Once summer arrives, the process is switched back to the more traditional, extended loan approval process.

• Seamless data access. Merrill Lynch’s Enterprise Data Solutions unit has used SOA to enable an enterprise search-and-discovery portal capable of searching 34 million records across multiple systems.9 Previously, users would have to juggle as many as 12 independent systems in order to manage accounts. Thanks to XML-based service interfaces and a service oriented abstraction layer, any client system can now seamlessly access the enterprise transaction systems through a common portal. Farm Credit Services of America (FCSAmerica), based in Omaha, Nebraska, supplies roughly one-third of the U.S. agriculture industry’s loans. FCSAmerica previously relied on nighttime batch processing to keep business information current across their mainframe-based loan accounting system, third-party customer relationship management (CRM) system, custom loan origination system written in Visual Basic, and their Web-based system dealer origination system written in Java. FCSAmerica was reaching capacity on nighttime batch processing, and transaction times for same-day loans were very slow due to personnel having to rekey information into multiple systems. Through SOA, the company deployed a shared-services CRM system to replace the tangle of point-to-point connections with a single, seamless view of enterprise data.10

• Asset reuse. The Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB) division of Wachovia, the fourth largest bank in the United States, observed that each business unit built similar capabilities (customer information management, data management, messaging, workflow logic, presentation logic, etc.) over and over.11 CIB rolled out a comprehensive SOA infrastructure, reframed the relationship between business and IT to be more interactive and consultative, and restructured the organization to better facilitate service oriented championship. The end result is dramatically improved time-to-market and a competitive edge that has helped the bank win several significant contracts. Financial planning firm Ameriprise Financial, with more than $490 billion in assets, has saved millions of dollars through its SOA initiative.12 It defines three service tiers: enterprise reuse, shared reuse, and specialized reuse.

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