Are banks returning in earnest to the principles of services-oriented architecture?
Namely, are they building code in reusable, interoperable and sharable chunks that can be mixed and matched to create and modify applications? Several participants at this week's Sibos conference in Toronto think so.
"Many banks started creating a services-oriented architecture five years ago and put it in the freezer" during the financial crisis, says Hans Tesselaar, director sourcing, innovation and governance at ING.
"We see momentum building in 2011," Tesselaar says. "Legacy systems and the people who maintain them are reaching the end of their life cycle."
Tesselaar has also noticed a trend among large banks toward buying off-the-shelf software instead of trying to build everything themselves. This strengthens the case for using a services-oriented architecture. "They need a way to connect that into their existing IT landscape," he says.
Tesselaar is also executive director of the Banking Industry Architecture Network, a not-for-profit set up by banks to devise standards and "service landscapes" for banks. "Most banks have a scattered landscape, they struggle with how and where to start implementing services-oriented architecture," he says.
BIAN released Service Landscape 1.5 in July. Tesselaar describes it as a blueprint, a meta model and a how-to-guide for deploying web services in a large bank. "It's a picture of what the bank should look like from an application standpoint," he says.
ING, Credit Suisse, Commonwealth Bank, Deutsche Bank, Postbank, Scotiabank, Standard Bank, Kutxa and UniCredit are among the bank members of BIAN.
"A services-oriented architecture can make a business more agile, and it's not an area of competition," says out Victor E. Dossey, technology strategist for banking worldwide financial services at Microsoft Corp., a vendor member of the group.
The return to SOA was echoed by others at Sibos. "SOA is becoming a disruptive technology," says George Ravich, chief marketing officer at global payment software company Fundtech Ltd. "We're seeing more banks invest in that."
"More products are using web services as an integration standard," says Tony Smith, principal solution consultant at ACI Worldwide Inc., another global payment software company.
