Financial institutions are diversifying their offerings and adapting their products and services to ensure that they are able to respond to future market challenges and support changing business operations in an increasingly competitive environment.
The traditional teller is becoming obsolete. Many existing branch information systems are based on old technologies, such as financial-specific controllers or basic PC systems. These systems are no longer adequate or appropriate for meeting the challenges of the new environment, which include competitive factors such as the following:
Financial institution services are mainly supported by applications whose core logic and data reside on host or enterprise systems, which are based on online transaction processing products such as CICS(R) or IMS™. For a bank teller application, access to these services (for example, to conduct a withdrawal transaction) requires delivery channels and a transaction posting engine that can handle the many tasks involved with transaction processing. The delivery channel and transaction posting engine must be able to manage the user interface, gather operation data, build host messages, process host responses, log transaction information into an electronic journal, access financial devices, and all other activities involved with processing the transaction. The IBM(R) Branch Transformation Toolkit for WebSphere(R) Studio is the transaction posting engine used by many financial institutions and other organizations for accessing back-end systems for banking delivery channels such as the traditional branch, call center, banking kiosk, Internet banking, and mobile access.
The Branch Transformation Toolkit provides a set of facilities to help with each of the processes and concepts mentioned above, modeling the real-life components of a teller system as objects and presenting them to development teams in a very familiar way. It accomplishes the following:
In summary, the IBM Branch Transformation Toolkit for WebSphere Studio product is a pragmatic infrastructure designed and built so that existing mission-critical systems can evolve rather than be replaced. Its architecture provides an environment for high development productivity and great flexibility to meet the challenges of the new pace of change in both technology and the banking industry.