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In the current issue of International Banking Systems , SAP’s SOA strategy for banking systems is covered in some detail.

The fact that it is SOA based would of itself not be that interesting except that in this case SAP is very much engaging with the customers, focusing on industry specific problems – the first phase involves 9 banks, all well known names such as Credit Suisse and Standard Bank – and are defining generic banking services. Generic in the sense that they cover capabilities that are required by any bank – say credit card payment processing.

The win for SAP is obvious – they can re-engineer and consolidation their many banking product lines in to a single SOA based framework of plug-together components (reducing on-going maintenance costs and complexity) and the components are being designed with help from their potential customers who will presumably buy what they have themselves designed.

The win for the banks depends on how generic these services are. I should point out that SAP are quoted in the article as claiming that the services are not necessarily SAP specific and approximately one third of the current crop are outside of the scope of SAP’s applications.

This is a great example of the huge amount of work that is going on turning SOA from concept into valuable reality - valuable to vendors and customers alike.

Posted by rbradley in Financial Services |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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