14 DAY TRIAL // The Redmond Company has introduced an initiative designed to provide prescriptive architecture guidance, tools and reference implementations among banking applications. The BAI Retail Delivery Conference & Expo was the stage for the unveiling of Microsoft's Banking Integration Factory initiative, and the Redmond Company's vision of constructing composite banking applications. Banking integration and interoperability is the promise of Microsoft's initiative to deliver its own .NET and technology and additional solutions from ARGO Data Resource Corp., Corillian Corp., Getronics, Harland Financial Solutions Inc., Jack Henry & Associates Inc. and other industry partners.
"Banks have dedicated massive efforts toward resolving integration issues between new business applications and their legacy software," said Greg Haislip, managing director for the banking industry in the U.S. Financial Services Group at Microsoft. "The new Banking Integration Factory helps solve this problem by providing a standard approach adopted by multiple vendors, to lead to more rapid implementation."
Aiming to enable consistency in the implementation of banking services, Banking Integration Factory is structured as a concert of guidelines and tools. "The initiative will not develop new message standards for the banking industry, but rather will establish commonality between vendors and the services they expose. This includes creating consistency in interfaces, complying with Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) profiles to increase interoperability, and cross-cutting aspects such as security, confidentiality, configuration, exceptions and logging - all in an effort to make integration much easier," revealed Microsoft via a press release.
The Banking Integration Factory's end result aims to be the centralization of cross-channel application integration in an uniform banking ecosystem complete with user interfaces accessible through browsers; Windows desktops, notebooks, Tablet PCs; mobile devices; and the Microsoft Office system.
"The movement to service-oriented architectures will inevitably lead to a complex array of business components in the bank's back offices," said Jerry Silva, research director for Delivery Channels and Retail Banking at TowerGroup. "So we must make plans to move toward an integration model at the front office that makes delivery of those components fast, easy and flexible."