Shifting economic conditions and rapidly evolving IT strategies along with mergers and acquisitions have left few banks with an appetite to untangle the morass of legacy systems running their businesses. Due to the siloed architecture within banks, where each business unit has their own systems and islands of information, core-banking replacement is a complex integration exercise. Islands of systems have to be either made redundant or integrated with the new solution based on
business requirements and processes. In such a scenario, the traditional approach of a 'big bang'replacement where all systems are replaced at one go is practically infeasible for large banks.
But this, thankfully, is not holding up progress and innovation, thanks, in part, to the increased adoption of Web services and its conceptual cousin, the Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA). SOA is neither a product nor a solution. It is an integration framework that binds internal and external services to create a solution. With SOA, instead of focusing on different applications that reside on different computers, the emphasis is on business services that represent several different underlying applications. As SOA can seamlessly be put into practice in existing IT environments it ensures that changes in technology and processes during core banking replacements can be phased out and managed effectively.
The plug-and-play benefits of SOA and Web services promises to increase the pace of innovation in financial services. Clearly, by adopting SOA and process driven core banking solutions banks worldwide can achieve tremendous benefits. Following this, this paper describes a banking solution framework which depicts how SOA delivers maximum agility.
SOA Plug-and-Play Services
Finacle solutions address the core banking, e-banking, Islamic banking, treasury, wealth management and CRM requirements of retail, corporate and universal banks worldwide.
