lustratus LiteBytes

I was at an excellent banking seminar last week in London…

…hosted by IBS Publishing, and I was fascinated by some of the discussions about core banking solutions and SOA. I had just presented SOA concepts to the largely business audience, and post-presentation discussion centred around the impact SOA could have on Banks choices for their core banking solutions. For some time, companies like I-Flex and Temenos have been having considerable success selling all-in-one core banking packages that can deal with all the different departmental needs (eg Treasury, Capital Markets, Retail, etc) within a core banking environment. One of the appeals of this approach is that this ensures no messy interfacing between different packages, and another is that it is easier to get enterprise visibility of what is going on, particularly important for areas such as compliance for example.

However, SOA may offer users a bit more flexibility in their selection choices. Assuming the application / package vendors play ball, and start building in SOA interfaces to their functionality (and why wouldn’t they, given the fact this may allow them to get into banks where other solutions are currently in use), then banks can at least consider a rather more ‘best-of-breed’ approach without too much risk. At least this approach has the potential to offer banks a bargaining chip to use in commercial negotiations, if nothing else.

Steve