Enabling an advanced Straight-Through Processing (STP) system that is transforming HVB Americas' capital markets transaction processing, the bank has been able to increase transaction volume and significantly reduce costs, delivering improved competitive advantage and increased operating margins.

As part of the Corporates and Markets division of HVB, the second largest bank in Germany, HVB Americas came to SeeBeyond with a set of business problems common to providers of financial services. HVB Americas' core transaction processes, such as foreign exchange (FX) and money markets trading, required substantial manual intervention to complete, which led to numerous errors, failed trades, and back-office overtime charges. These conditions increased costs significantly.

The error rates caused by manual intervention in the business processes - estimated as high as 30% in one internal study - were preventing the bank from handling higher transaction volumes and limiting growth. HVB Americas identified an STP strategy as the approach to deliver a scalable business model and set out to find a technology solution that would also enable real-time monitoring and automate exception handling. From deal capture and trade processing through back-office confirmation and settlement, HVB was looking for a process integration and automation capability that could ultimately support process re-engineering.

"First and foremost, we wanted to provide our business users with the ability to monitor in real-time the specific processes relevant to them. Of course, this is now called business activity monitoring," said David Dart, Managing Director and CIO, HVB Americas. "SeeBeyond was the only vendor that seemed to understand our vision - we didn't want a monitoring tool for technologists; we wanted a real-time monitoring tool for business users."

After evaluating integration offerings from other vendors, HVB Americas initially selected the SeeBeyond platform based on its "time to market" and lowest total cost of ownership. The Bank most recently extended its use of SeeBeyond by leveraging the intelligence in the SeeBeyond ICAN 5 Suite to develop a composite application-based, real-time exception notification and management dashboard. If the application detects an error, the individual who is best suited to address it receives a notification, saving both time and money.

In addition, the application reuse and service orchestration capabilities available through the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based solution from SeeBeyond have allowed the Bank to re-engineer its processes while staying within its existing packaged application environment. Commenting on the process re-engineering capabilities, Mr. Dart added, "With ICAN 5, we now have the ability to create this new breed of process-driven applications with customized end-user interfaces at a fraction of what it would cost to use standard development tools or to purchase packaged, off-the-shelf applications. Business value is no longer about packaged applications, it's about the business-user services those applications can be orchestrated to provide."

Leveraging SeeBeyond, the transaction error rate is near zero for a number of the Bank's products, and it has been estimated that HVB recovered the cost of investment in the integration platform within three to six months.

"HVB Americas understood from the beginning of the implementation that choosing the right integration platform would enable them to create competitive advantage," said Larry Scott, Vice President of Global Financial Services for SeeBeyond. "The SeeBeyond ICAN 5 Suite has enabled HVB Americas to deploy a strategic technology infrastructure that enables, and in some cases drives, business growth by eliminating manual processes and optimizing business operations."