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Efficient business process integration allows Bank SinoPac to reduce labor costs and improve speed-to-market for new products
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Business impact
Integrated banking processes across four regions, making it possible to offer new products at lower cost and reduce solution development costs by at least 30 percent.
Issue
Bank SinoPac needed to improve efficiency and customer service in business units spread over four different regions. Aspiring to serve customers in Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong and the United States, SinoPac faced the challenge of different technical, legal and regulatory systems in each region where it has branch offices or partner banks. The problem was particularly acute when it tried to serve high-end customers with accounts in two or more of these regions. The bank needed to be able to present these customers with unified account information and design effective financial products for them.
Executive summary
Bank SinoPac is a Taiwan-based commercial bank with a financial network that has operations in four different regions. Because of the different regulatory and legal requirements in each region, critical transactions such as money transfer among regional branches were difficult and inefficient.
Banking processes in each region had to be integrated in a way that would allow for new capabilities and future core banking transformations. IBM used a model-driven approach to efficiently integrate the heterogeneous processes and to reduce risks associated with business transformation.
The project is a joint effort of IBM and Bank SinoPac to build a model-driven business integration platform that will enable rapid development of new banking applications and integration with existing applications. Together, they have built a regional services platform using IBM WebSphereŽ Business Integration Service Utility to support Bank SinoPac's Cross Pacific Account program. This is one of the first systems that can allow bank clients to make transactions among multiple accounts in different currencies and different banks in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the U.S. This project has also enhanced the bank’s innovation profile – Global Finance ranked it as the world's best IT Innovative Bank – at the same level with Citicorp and Wells Fargo.
Before implementing WebSphereŽ Business Integration Service Utility, Bank SinoPac’s business and IT staffs found it challenging to work together even in one region. But the tool was so effective that when a flaw was discovered a week before going online with a process for cross-regional money transfer, the teams from each region were able to revise the process quickly enough to launch it on schedule.
In the end, the project was completed on time and on budget, enabling Bank SinoPac to reduce solution development costs by at least 30 percent.
The bank also intends to rebuild its application middleware to have the advanced capability of business logic processing, so that its IT staff can design, develop and deploy its own business logic on the integration platform. The application middleware will connect to the various back-end legacy systems through multiple channels, for inter- and intra-business integration.
What IBM did
Researchers in IBM’s China Research Lab developed WebSphereŽ Business Integration Service Utility to make it easier to use for collaborative software. This flexible model is designed to adopt a suitable platform directly in line with the client's needs. It can also be modified for the client's existing application software. Other key features are:
• A business view that provides a new methodology to model integrated business processes.
• An IT view offers a lightweight processing logic automation environment with tooling.
• The end-to-end model-driven business process integration methodology to link the business and IT view.
Capabilities applied
IBM’s China Research Lab combined high-powered analytics, a set of concept descriptions for applications, systems and units to communicate with one another and a practical runtime environment to deliver a full cycle process management solution for business integration. WebSphereŽ Business Integration Service Utility includes methods, tools and a runtime environment that delivers flexible business logic processing capabilities. Because of the effectiveness of the tool, business and IT staffs are able to communicate better, improving the speed and accuracy of the results.