Enterprise Integration in Flexcube UBS

We live in a world with complex and often complicated business needs hence the need for specialized solutions and systems dedicated to meeting these peculiar needs.

Banking and finance institutions have found itself in this situation hence the emergence of numerous 3rd party applications necessary to meeting specialized day to day business needs and ensuring the institutions are on the cutting edge of delivering services to the ever changing customer needs.

Obviously, there is to an extent any core banking application can adequately handle and satisfy the present needs and also keep pace with the evolution of the ever changing business needs.

This is the bases on which banks and financial institutions like every other enterprise sector have to compete in acquiring several 3rd party specialized application solutions to be in the fore front of delivering value to business.

 However, there is a need to ensure that these specialized application systems hand off data to the core banking solution (in most cases) as the need to have a single source of truth cannot be over emphasized. Every institution has to deliver business reports to its stakeholders and regulatory bodies at one point or another hence the need to streamline and consolidate the various application data to one data source.

 Major Approaches to enterprise system integration

There are 2 major approaches to system-to-system integration within an enterprise, Point-to-Point and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Point-to-Point Approach:

In this approach we require ground up development of application services to enable transaction data flow between the 2 systems involved. This approach will require in most cases a separate server sitting between the 2 systems for each integration project. This means that for an institution that has say 58, 3rd party applications to integrate with the core application, there may be required 58 additional servers (physical or virtual) to achieve their goal.

Besides the enormous cost associated with this, the biggest problem which normally shows up many years later is in the optimal management of the setup as each integration may have been developed by different vendors or experts with different technology, approach and in most cases poorly documented solutions. What happens to the institution 5 years or 10 years down the line when most of the resources that delivered these solutions may have moved on?

Suffice it to say that not everything is bad about Point-to-Point enterprise integration, at least not when it comes to system failure or disaster event. The failure of one of the systems may not impact the rest of the applications since each runs on its separate server hence minimal impact when compared to SAO setup.

Service Oriented Architecture Approach:

The SOA approach was developed to address the challenges and frustrations experienced by most institutions in their attempt to synchronize their systems using Point-to-Point approach. These challenges are not only in terms of the huge cost associated with the approach but also the complication of managing the setup in terms of capacity and sustainability over time.

SOA approach involves exposing the core system functionalities to the 3rd party applications in a secured and controlled manner ensuring that only allowed functionality of the core system can be accessed by the 3rd party systems. This approach not only ensures the protection of the integrity of the core system but also encourages the use of middle ware server to orchestrate, translate, embellish, manage and administer the services to the 3rd party applications.

For example, instead of having additional 58 servers hosting our 3rd party developed service handlers, only one additional high end server (with enterprise service bus application) may be required to achieve the integration of the core application and the 58, 3rd party applications!

Besides the hardware cost drastically reduced, this approach does not require the diverse and huge human resource requirements to achieve as most of the tasks are configuration based. The service (code) reuse is another priceless value that this approach offers as well.

But with this approach, service delivery may get grounded when this single server goes down in the case of disaster event because obviously the entire connected 3rd party applications may not be able to access the core application. While this appears like a huge risk that will make the choice of SOA approach suspicious, this approach is normally accompanied by robust and efficient disaster recovery management with well articulated failover cluster solutions in place.

Besides, those that have been within Flexcube UBS long enough and well abreast with the technology trend would have realized that Oracle has no provision for point-to-point integration within the huge FCUBS revolution taking place. It is now an issue of you follow or be dragged along!

There exists several enterprise service bus (proprietary and non-proprietary) out there to help the FCUBS banks get on board very easily. While some of the ESBs are high end, too expensive and sometimes an over kill especially for the small and mid-size banks, there are still many robust and cost effective ones that have been proven to have met most business requirements with much less total cost of ownership.