The financial services industry faces multiple challenges, with lower margins on basic services, shifting regulatory and geo-political environments, increasing IT maintenance costs and more intense competition being the most urgent. As a result, organizations are looking for ways to improve settlement efficiency in international operations, as well as avenues to accelerate risk and cost reduction measures. Also, with a common focus on IT cost reduction and the introduction of new legislative requirements, many firms are faced with a backlog in application development.

The benefits of an integrated, service-oriented solution can have a dramatic impact on the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for application development. Recent research published by leading European analyst firm, Butler Group, has shown that organizations using the SOA-based ICAN 5 platform from SeeBeyond can save customers up to 86% in the time spent building and developing composite applications, leading to an overall 58% savings in overall project cost.(1)

As a SeeBeyond customer and the Director of IT strategies for the Financial Markets Group of AEGON USA, Jeff Gleason said, "In the past, with point-to-point integration and development techniques, we tied ourselves too closely to the related administrative systems, negatively impacting both our cost of implementing new products and our time-to-market for providing new capabilities. With SeeBeyond ICAN 5, we now have a single platform to build service-enabled processes, and have seen early evidence of cost savings with three services from one business process being leveraged across hundreds of different programs."

An SOA for financial services organizations should compromise a set of modular services based on a Web services architecture. These will typically focus on the layers of a service-oriented architecture including application and messaging connectivity, business process encapsulation/orchestration and composite application definition. The SeeBeyond FS-SOA "FastTrack" consulting offering includes modules for visioning, definition, framework creation, training and pilot development. The offering includes options for: SWIFTNet, corporate connectivity for payments, corporate actions, securities processing, exception management, single entity view for data management and integration of financial data streams. This consulting offering can be used to rapidly develop financial services-specific composite applications, transforming both the time and cost models across an entire development lifecycle.

"Implementing an FS-SOA can give financial services organizations true competitive advantage by providing them with an architecture that brings together existing applications and business processes to create value-added composite applications," said Larry Scott, Vice President, Global Financial Services, SeeBeyond. "By leveraging commonalities across existing applications, data and processes can be reused across the organization to significantly increase ROI from existing IT investments, while reducing both time to market and time to value for new product and service offerings."

The SeeBeyond FS-SOA offering is based on the SeeBeyond Integrated Composite Application Network (SeeBeyond ICAN) Suite, the platform of choice for many leading financial services firms today. A sampling of SeeBeyond's clients in the financial services industry include ABN AMRO, Banca IMI, BNP Paribas, Clearstream, Commerzbank, Hypovereinsbank, KBC Securities, Nicholas Applegate Capital Management, Northern Trust, Standard Bank, UBS Global Asset Management and Zurcher Kantonalbank.