SOA in Banking - EBS Building Society gains competitive edge with new channel

Service Oriented Architecture SOA in Banking - EBS Building Society gains competitive edge with new channel

“With our service oriented architecture, we have the ability to build services as standardized components that can be reused and combined to address changing business goals. We realized we could better compete with anyone regardless of size because this ability enables us to bring new innovative services to market faster.” - –David Yeates, Senior Manager, IT architecture, EBS Building Society

Customer: EBS Building Society - IBM SOA Customer
Deployment Country: Ireland
Industry: Banking - SOA in Banking
Solution: Business Continuity, Business Resiliency, Enabling Business Flexibility, Service Oriented Architecture SOA, Small & Medium Business

Overview - SOA in Banking
A building society based on cooperative mutual principles, EBS has been offering home financing to its members since 1935 and today commands in excess of a 10 percent share of the 26 billion EUR (31 billion USD) Irish home loan market.

Business need: SOA in Banking - EBS has traditionally operated exclusively through its network of branches and franchised agents. But the market for home loans in Ireland has been transformed by a new breed of independent mortgage brokers who now account for 40 percent of the market. To respond to this marketplace change, EBS needed a channel to reach these brokers.

Solution: SOA in Banking - EBS had prepared an infrastructure for this innovation, which would connect the company directly to brokers’ in-house systems, by previously laying the ground­work for service orientation using IBM WebSphere® Application Server Network Deployment and IBM Rational® Application Developer for WebSphere. A service oriented architecture (SOA) provides significant business value by exposing exist­ing systems as “services”—without having to write extensive code or scrap previous investments.

Results: SOA in Banking - New online channel for reaching broker community that enables brokers to connect seamlessly with EBS from within their own companies’ online business systems

Benefits: SOA in Banking -Mortgage application processed in just hours compared with 2-3 days taken by competitors; independent mortgage broker channel now accounts for substantial portion of EBS’s business after only 6 months, far exceeding expectations; new channel added without significantly increasing staff levels