The winning banks of the future will provide their customers with a single seamless view of all their products. Customers will want to access their various portfolios over multiple channels from a host of locations. Desktop computers, palmtops, interactive TV and mobile phones could all be used to browse information at work, at home or when travelling.
Many of the existing applications built by organizations to provide these services have so far been built using a piecemeal and unfocused approach. Existing legacy systems have been extended and new functionality added each time a new requirement for a new channel is identified. A common unified view of customer data is missing; instead a host of separate vertical initiatives have been implemented. High profile acquisitions and mergers within the market place have further complicated this situation. In the retail bank arena new Internet banks are gaining the upper hand through customer satisfaction and reduced back office development costs. They do not have large legacy applications to integrate in this fashion.
By implementing Microsoft's new .NET framework within their future IS strategy, retail banks could realize considerable back office cost savings and compete more effectively with newer Internet 'start ups'.
Web services have been heralded by many as the most important software development innovation of recent years. David Smith, VP and Research Director for Gartner recently stated: "Businesses that ignore its potential or decide to sit out its early stages will find themselves outpaced by rivals that take advantage of Web Services to improve their agility". In short, web services are reusable, self-describing, self-contained applications that are platform and implementation neutral. A web service is remotely invoked using the SOAP open standard. SOAP is based on current de facto standards and hence supported by a multitude of devices. .NET is Microsoft's framework for enabling web services. Adding a web services layer to the way retail banks design their systems architecture will support multiple channel access to portfolios. But can .NET be used to provide a single, seamless mechanism for accessing data and reduce backend costs at the same time?
Using .NET to resolve these legacy issues is relatively straightforward. For each vertical application within the retail bank a web services adapter is written. The adapter can speak both the language of the legacy application and that of web services. This will provide an easy to use 'wrapper' around the existing system. Next a horizontal layer is added to the overall design: the web services 'gateway'. This is the key component that will provide customers with a seamless interface with the retail bank. It is a single entry point for all channels and provides a common infrastructure for accessing data externally. The gateway receives requests from clients, processes these and invokes existing functionality via the web service adapters. The response is handled, processed and then fed back to the calling application. All that customers perceive, no matter what device they are using, is a seamless set of common services with which they can interact.
This approach not only provides a seamless view of customer data, it can also realise large back office cost savings. By wrapping existing systems with web service adapters, the bank negates the need for an expensive legacy code rewrite every time a new channel is identified. Web services are based on SOAP which is simple to implement (as its name implies: the 'Simple' Object Access Protocol). The .NET tools, languages and technologies provided by Microsoft are now relatively mature, easy to use and simple to implement. The new technology is based on well-established standards and the learning curve is not steep for developers. SOAP is an open standard and free to use, thereby removing any dependencies on expensive, proprietary middleware. By providing a single entry point for all channels and user access, the need for separate infrastructures for each channel is removed. The web service gateway can provide shared services for all communication including security and logging. This implementation of a corporate-wide, shared communications engine makes the setting up of any new channels very simple.
There is another very powerful way in which .NET can reduce back office costs. Components built as web services are accessible by a huge variety of client applications. Just as it is possible to expose a service externally, it is also possible to consume services that have been developed by third parties, thereby avoiding the habitual 'reinventing of the wheel'. By outsourcing the development of carefully selected services, IT departments can focus better on the core components at the heart of their business. Microsoft's Hailstorm initiative is an integral part of the .NET package. Hailstorm is a series of .NET web services that can be used by developers in this way. However Microsoft are not the only ones providing these services and a plethora of software vendors are planning to expose their services in this fashion.
That web services are here to stay is not in doubt. Microsoft have been at the forefront of this technology for some time and their .NET framework is a robust and easy to implement approach for enabling this powerful new technology. By adding adapters and a web services gateway to existing systems retail banks can provide seamless access for customers over a multitude of front-ends and bring down back-office costs at the same time. Banks that decide to ignore this new technology risk losing out in the long run to more adaptive and flexible rivals.
