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SOA: Case StudyHalifax Bank of ScotlandIF.com

Chapter 17

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Background

• Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBoS) is a UK financial services provider with divisions in Retail banking, insurance and investment, business banking, corporate banking and treasury.

• It is UK’s largest mortgage and savings provider with a customer base of 22 million.

• HBoS was formed with through the merger of Halifax and Bank of Scotland

• IF (Intelligent Finance) was launched with aim of attracting customers outside Halifax esp. in UK.

• It was launched as Project Greenfield in 2000 and became a successful http://www.IF.com in 2003: look mortgage offset demo.

• In 2004 IF announced that the project had broken even and has become a huge success.

• Latest news: HBoS is being acquired by Llyods TSB.

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Business principles

• In order to prevail in a competitive market a unique product has to be devised, enabling customers to link to a range of personal banking products– mortgages, credit cards, personal loans, savings, and current accounts…

• With interest charged only on the difference between their debit and credit balances.

• In order to be cost effective, only direct channel will be used, no expensive branch offices.

• Market survey indicated that the direct channel would be combination of web access and telephone.

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Core business components

• At the core of IF.com is a generic banking engine which offers access to products and services for different customer access channels.

• It was a very large project under heavy time pressure for delivery: it was decided to take a full blown SOA approach for its transactional aspects.

• It was developed initially as xml/idl; later transformed into wsdl.

• The banking engine provides a suite a XML, web services, processing over 1000000 transactions a day.

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Business Impact

Extreme Time pressure

Modern Accesschannels

Greenfieldbank

InnovativeBankingProducts:offsetting

customers

competition

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Business outcome: timeline

Oct.1999J. SpowartJoins halifaxGreenfiled co.

2000IF.comlaunch

2001 2002IF announcesIncrease in Balances and mortgageIncrease to 9%

2003

Savings and currentBalances increase by 50%Customers doubled 600000

2004

Customer baseIncreases to 820000Assets also double

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IF’s Service Architecture

Enterprise Layer

Web channel

Web channel

Call center

Call center

Emailchannel

Emailchannel

Basic layerLinks toBanksSWIFT,etc

Links toBanksSWIFT,etc

Feeds to general ledger

Feeds to general ledger

Credit scoring

Credit scoring

Customer accounts

Customer accounts

BackoffWorkflowMgt.

BackoffWorkflowMgt.

Process + intermediary service layer

IF.com onePlan Engine

Openaccount

Fullfilment

Servicerequest

DocumentMgt.

DocumentMgt.

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Details of SOA (p.364): Banking engine

• Banking engine: a mixture between process centric service and intermediary service

• For example banking engine provides access to different customer accounts that reside on different sub-systems: does not add much to business functionality Intermediary service

• Other parts of the banking engine provides service request features: “replace lost credit card”

• Service request feature uses the underlying workflow engine• Banking engine provides the interface between the workflow

engine and the user access channels through a set of process-oriented service interfaces. – Approximately 250 different service requests are implemented

this way• Another set of banking engine interfaces is dedicated to the

offsetting functionality of the bank.

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Banking engine (contd.)

• Offsetting: it is also a combination of intermediary and process-oriented services

• One the one hand, it provides the necessary functionality that is required for customers to control the balances on their individual accounts.

• On the other hand, it also acts as intermediary for complex calculations in the basic services, that take place, for example, if mortgage and credit-card interest is being set off against interest on savings.

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Centralized banking engine

• Centralized banking engine to allow all user channels to share common functionality and to provide consistent view.

• This design allow for efficient integration among different access technologies.

• Disadvantages: lack of modularity, development and maintenance of services difficult; team is currently addressing this issue.

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Key Implementation Details

• XML services: because of the extremely tight schedule and high integration requirements, existing EAI and blueprints would not be suitable.

• SOA, XML, SOAP and WDSL were used even though not many details were available at that time.

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…Implementation details

• Service repository: IF uses the CCC Harvest source control system as central repository for all service definitions used by the project.

• All services are defined as XML Schema definitions and WSDL definitions.

• Repository managed by XML Tsar.• Content of the service repository is used by IF.com build

manager to generate type-safe APIs and stubs for a variety of programming languages including VB, C++ and Java

• These stubs allow developers to client-side and server-side programs/services to access them in a transparent way.

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IF.com Service Repository

BusinessAnalyst

XML Tsar(technicalArchitect)

Service repository

XML schema Definitions +

WSDL definitions

WSDL compiler

Java stubs VB stubs C++ stubs

Build repository

Buildmanager

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Project Management

• Design in Action plan (DIA) provided a delivery program, including mobilization plans, training plans, and an outline of required infrastructure.

• Work streams and IT steering committee: 23 work streams including banking engine, service design, DB design , workflow, mainframe integration etc.

• Architecture board: six senior architects to oversee the overall design.

• XML Tsar and Tsardom: to design, develop, deploy and manage XML related service interfaces, repository, and specifications.

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Technology

• We now look at the actual technology used in realization of the implementation discussed.

• Technical architecture, XML service definitions and technical infrastructure.

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Technical Architecture (TA)

• TA of IF.com required integration of wide range of technologies

• Banking engine is implemented in Java and BEA WebLogic

• Web channel is based entirely on Microsoft technologies: since existing system had security approval for this system for MS products.

• Call center and IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition) is based on Genesys CTI suite using customized C/C++ on Unix.

• Backend consisted of a variety of mainframe, unix and NT systems.

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Technical Architecture of IF.com

XML Switch

OS/390mainframe

Other Backendsystems

OtherBackendsystems

XML switchClient APIs

XML parserCORBA etc.

EJB Application server

IF.comOne plan

session beans

WSDL Java Skeletons

RDBMSJDBC

CTI server

WSDLC++ Stubs

Call centerIVR

ASP/IIS/MTS server

WSDLVB/COM Stubs

Web Channel

SOAP(XML/HTTP)

XML/IIOPXML MQ series

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TA: Service repository, service interfaces, and contracts

• All services are hardwired through configuration files. That is, there is no explicit service registry.

• Basic services: are implemented using different technologies ranging from CORBA, DCOM , XML and MQ series.

• Banking engine: IF.COM engine is based on about 1300 schema definitions, 120 WSDL WS interfaces, 600 WS operations, 1,000,000 XML SOAP transactions a day. (one of biggest and most successful)

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Technical Architecture (contd.)

• Banking engine services is divided into a number of namespaces including Common, ContcatCentre, Workflow, OpenAccount, PersonalAdvisors, QuickQuote, and ServiceRequest.

• OpenAccount namespace in turn includes service interfaces such as AddressMgr, ApplicationMgr, BroadRequest, OfferEngine, CreditCardApplication, CurrAccounApplication, etc.

• Banking engine runs on J2EE application server and session beans to implement service interfaces.

• IF has realized the importance of dividing the complex monolithic banking engine into smaller service units and is attempting this in the next version.

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Lessons Learned, Benefits and Perspectives

• SOA requires not only sound technical design but also a project management initiative that supports technical architecture on the project level.

• XML Tsar as key project management tool for coordinating the development of a large set of technical interfaces.

• Banking engine was initially developed as a tightly coupled system to be evolved into a loosely couples service-oriented system.

• 90% of services were developed in first 9months.• Later phases involved maintenance, third-party

integration and increasing system agility.• SOA provided IF.com one of the most advanced IT

architectures in the banking world.