How ING is Using IT Standards to Speed Product Development

ING is embarking on a project that will leverage emerging standards to develop new products that can be easily integrated across the multi-national bank's global units.

"ING will be able to respond more rapidly to changing customer needs, bringing products to market faster," says Saul van Beurden, CIO/COO retail banking direct and international at ING. "Due to the re-usability of functionality and connectivity services, we expect to experience lower IT costs."

ING is an active member in the Banking Industry Architecture Network, which has spent the past few years recruiting banks and tech firms to participate in an effort that standardizes how service-oriented architecture is leveraged by banks and technology companies. Service oriented architecture (SOA) refers to code and data structures that can be reused by programmers to make development more efficient. BIAN has released a blueprint on how such sharing could work. The standards could go a long way toward saving time and expenses for bank IT projects.

Van Beurden says that ING has also been working on a six-year core banking upgrade plan that will see a series of renovations around the world, adding, "ING is adopting a more standardized landscape and is going through a platform rationalization, trying to stay as close as possible to the emerging BIAN standard." The rationalization is designed to speed up the process of product development, a concern for financial institutions that are looking to adapt their core systems to enable rapid developments in mobile banking and other digital financial services.

Van Beurden says ING has endorsed two products for its 42 banks around the world - Finacle from Infosys and Profile from FIS.

Infosys is part of the BIAN consortium, and says its core banking platforms are built using a common information model based on ISO 20022 message models, which is designed to enable "plug and play" architecture. Part of Infosys' plug and play effort also includes a partnership with TIBCO's ActiveMatrix SOA platform, which helps firms deploy, host, manage and monitor tech services.

FIS' Profile uses SOA to provide real-time integration with all delivery channels and enterprise middleware. It supports the Interactive Financial eXchange (IFX) message standard. IFX and BIAN have entered into a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on interoperability initiatives. FIS, which does not appear on BIAN's member roster, did not respond to queries on direct involvement in BIAN by Wednesday afternoon.

The challenge for ING will be to pull off the company-wide project while enabling local autonomy for product development in specific markets. "We are rolling out the new systems in a replicated way, meaning that we have created a core library which is the same for each country," Van Beurden says. "We then have regional and local libraries in support. By using this methodology, we have created the highest possible synergies while keeping local flexibility."

At ING's local unit level, one of the more interesting initiatives is ING Direct Australia's use of virtual x86 servers to allow developers to create images of the banking platform that can be patched or upgraded in isolation, creating a "sandbox" for faster IT development, testing and experimentation.

In an interview for an upcoming story about the initiative in May's issue of BTN, Ben Issa, head of IT strategy for ING Direct in Australia, said the unit has been able to make hundreds of "copies" of the network for developers in less than a year. "We're able to be far more innovative than ever before because the shackles have been taken off," Issa says.

Details on how the Australian unit's "sandbox" method of development and testing can enhance ING's corporatewide development strategy have not emerged, though the Australian IT team was expected to demonstrate the concept at the institution's Amsterdam headquarters.