SOA: Case Study Halifax Bank of Scotland IF.com

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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 financila
  services provider with divisions in Retail
  banking, insurance and investment, business
  banking, corporate banking and treasury.
• It is UKs 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
• In 2004 IF announced that the project had broken
  even and has become a huge success.

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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
customers
Modern Access channels
Extreme Time pressure
Innovative Banking Products offsetting
competition
Greenfield bank
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Business outcome timeline
Oct.1999 J. Spowart Joins halifax Greenfiled co.
Savings and current Balances increase by
50 Customers doubled 600000
2004
2001
2002
2003
2000
IF announces Increase in Balances and
mortgage Increase to 9
IF.com launch
Customer base Increases to 820000 Assets also
double
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IFs Service Architecture
Enterprise Layer
Process intermediary service layer
Fullfil ment
Service request
Open account
IF.com onePlan Engine
Basic layer
Feeds to general ledger
Links to Banks SWIFT,etc
Credit scoring
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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
XML schema Definitions WSDL definitions
Business Analyst
XML Tsar (technical Architect)
Service repository
WSDL compiler
Build manager
Java stubs
VB stubs
C stubs
Build repository
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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
SOAP(XML/HTTP)
WSDL Java Skeletons
EJB Application server
IF.com One plan session beans
RDBMS
JDBC
XML switch Client APIs
XML parser CORBA etc.
XML/IIOP
XML MQ series
XML Switch OS/390 mainframe
Other Backend systems
Other Backend systems
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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.