Reusable services result in more efficient IT infrastructure for financial services provider
The Challenge:
Nowadays providing new customer-oriented products represents a core driver to success in the highly competitive financial services sector. But the IT infrastructures historically employed across the sector often act as inhibitors, prolonging the time it takes to get new products to market. Application-specific “IT silos” tend to exist in isolation from one another, are time intensive and costly to integrate and exhibit high levels of functional redundancy.
The Solution:
One of Germany’s largest savings bank associations wants to create new business by providing online loans to private customers. In order to make the process as cost effective as possible, processes such as customer credit checks need to be completed automatically. But developing a new application silo is out of question and instead the bank wants to implement an SOA concept that, if it proves successful, can be expanded into other areas of the system landscape. For the bank two factors come into play when selecting SOA platforms: the software needs to be inexpensive but nevertheless provide fully-fledged functionality, security and expandability. The SOPERA ASF open-source platform excels in this regard, making it the ideal solution for the bank.
The Result:
As part of the project some 18 online services were developed using the SOPERA ToolSuite. These included credit check services, calculating loan payment terms as well as customer information and offer management. Here the sales front end is provided by a web application that is connected to the SOPERA ESB via SOAP / HTTPS. High security standards are achieved by using SOPERA ASF’s built-in authentication and authorization functionality, whereas operations monitoring is achieved using the SOPERA HQ option pack. This solution not only proved quick to develop and implement but also boasts very low operational costs. Indeed, given the solution’s merits, the bank has now embarked on an SOA strategy designed to gradually integrate existing silo applications into the platform.
