SOA in Banking - St.George Bank - IBM SOA customer

Service oriented architecture SOA in Banking - St.George Bank saves 15 million USD through re-use of key business functions with IBM WebSphere solution - IBM SOA customer

A pragmatic and profitable approach to building a flexible bank and introducing new products

“We no longer want to invest the time and resources in two- or three-year initiatives. Business is changing so fast these days that we can’t afford to roll something into production that represents the thinking of three years ago.” - —Greg Booker, Head of Group Architecture, St.George Bank

Customer: St.George Bank - IBM SOA Customer
Deployment Country: Australia
Industry: Banking, Financial Markets - SOA in Banking
Solution: Enabling Business Flexibility, SOA Service Oriented Architecture

Overview - SOA in Banking
Growth by acquisition can help banks gain a larger share of the marketplace, but it can also lead to challenges associated with greater process and technology complexity. This, in turn, can threaten customer service and satisfaction. This is exactly what happened at St.George Bank, Australia’s fifth largest retail bank, during the middle and late 1990s when several regional savings and loan banks, as well as Barclay’s, came together under the St.George Bank umbrella.

Business need: SOA in Banking
St.George was focused on a large-scale integration of four separate banks. During this time, the bank focused many of its resources on standardizing its technology and weaving together disparate platforms using a point-to-point method of integration. As the bank came out of the year 2000, it found that the tightly coupled systems and siloed information platforms developed in this process needed to be integrated to ensure flexibility, tight cost control and speed to market for new applications.

Solution: SOA in Banking
St.George bank implemented a service oriented architecture (SOA) that re-uses business functions and loosely couples them to back-end systems with a messaging middleware solution from IBM

Benefits: SOA in Banking
Saved an estimated 20 million AUD (15 million USD) by re-using 47% of its key business functions; realized payback in less than a year for new personal lending customer application system; customer satisfaction rating has rebounded to 75% from approximately 55% prior to the solution