Having helped 2 large scale banks adopt & implement SOA, I thought today is a good time to take a look at the larger picture, leaving aside the technology aspect of it. I came across this excellent article written by Chris Shayan. Although it was written in 2008, it actually sums up the situation rather well. Please read the full article to get an exact picture on what SOA role is in a Core banking application.
I also really liked the Reference Architecture that he came up based on SOA.
“The Reference Architecture is a framework used as a single point of reference to illustrate the key operating elements of the core banking solution. The reference architecture has following categories: technology, people, functions, processes, services, products, delivery channels, and customer segments.”
He then goes on to list what things are mandatory for each category. I agree on most of them and happy to say that the two implementations that I worked on, covered 70% of it. The 30% not covered is partly due to the tradeoff’s between what can be achieved in the given timeline by business and what things are nice to have, but can be done later on when time permits.
The business processes that he covers in the list, just would like to mention that architects usually like to have them broken down in Coarse Grained Services and Fine Grain Services. CG Services are the ones that actually achieve an entire business process and usually have compensation logic built in it as well. They simply control the flow of the business process and call the Fine Grained Services which actually performs/achieve a business operation. It’s important that technology people ensure that services support Synchronous / Asynchronous calls, Batch mode etc. Also, its quite beneficial to have a Business Rule Engine that is dynamic and configurable. Embedding them in code is never a good idea.
Once you have your services ready (via in a Service Bus), it makes sense to have Business / Exception reporting on it via a portal. Also service metrics can also be reported upon.
All in all, a very good article to get an easy understanding of SOA in core banking applications by the author Chris Shayan.
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