Banking on SOA

17.07.2006

Corporate and investment banking is a complex business. With dozens of highly customized financial products and services ranging from IPOs and derivatives to leasing, research, advice, and trading, each of the nine business units within CIB demanded its own unique applications, Certoma says. And all of their businesses are intensely competitive, with extreme pressure to get better products to market faster and at lower cost.

Furthermore, financial products require lots of data-intensive modeling, so there's a premium on high performance applications that can give traders and analysts an edge. "It's all about complexity," Certoma says. "There's a great deal of money to be made if you have the top talent and the technology to do it."

The vision Certoma proposed in 2004 was a complete restructuring of how CIB did development, centered around a core of reusable frameworks, components, and services that each of the business units could leverage. Each business had been building similar capabilities over and over -- desktop presentation, data management, workflow management, messaging, and customer information management. "If we did it right, it would give them a lift on productivity," Certoma explains, "and over time it would be cheaper, because the output for our fixed cost would be multiples greater."

Fast forward 20 months, and Certoma's plan is bearing fruit. CIB's Equity Structured Products unit, for example, needed a better "equity volitility" application, to analyze the financial risks of new derivatives products they were thinking of offering.

"A lot of them were modeling deals on Excel, and it would take anywhere from half an hour to a couple hours," Certoma explains. Using CIB's new "volatility surface capability" component -- shared across CIB -- plus new common desktop and server frameworks and a utility grid framework for performance, developers in the Structured Products group were able to build a highly customized, high performance app quickly.