Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives

6.2. FINANCIAL SECTOR

Probably the most celebrated examples of SOA transforming industry come from the financial sector. The process-centric nature of finance, and especially of the insurance industry, lends itself well to SOA. Agility and reuse, value propositions that financial organizations regard very highly, also point toward service orientation. Finally, enterprises in the financial sector tend to have a considerable collection of legacy systems due to the age of many of the organizations as well as the frequency of mergers and acquisitions within this sector.

Banking and Investments

Service orientation took root in banks and brokerages long before it was a mainstream, well-defined concept. Common themes include seamless access to data and business logic that was previously locked away in silos, reuse of systems and capabilities across business units, and service orientation of business processes to enable agility.

Consider the following cases of service orientation:

• Improved business processes. Synovus, a regional bank in the southeastern part of the United States with about $33 billion in assets, took a service oriented approach to its Internet banking and technology modernization initiatives. ^[] It automated and streamlined nearly 30 manual processes using SOA and business process management (BPM) and did so under a very aggressive timeline. Harley-Davidson Financial Services, the financial services arm of Harley, focused their SOA initiative on building services around ...