Integrating business information streams in a core banking architecture: A practical experience

Abstract

Traditional commercial and retail banks are under great pressure from new competitors. They must rise to the challenges of understanding their customer actions and behaviors, and be ready to meet their expectations even before they explicitly express them. But the ability to know customers’ demands in nearly real-time requires the evolution of existing architectures to support the detection, notification, and processing of business events to manage business information streams. This paper describes a practical experience in evolving a core banking enterprise architecture by leveraging business event exploitation, and includes the definition of business events; the design of a reference architecture and its integration points with the legacy architecture, as well as the description of an initial governance approach. Furthermore, as the core banking architecture is a critical infrastructure we have evaluated the performance of the evolved architecture so as to understand whether or not it can meet the banks’ quality levels.