This leading Swedish mortgage provider is launching a program to automate the processes used to manage relationships with its 250,000 customers. Its innovative Service-Oriented Architecture is designed to provide SBAB with the flexibility to manage product, market and competitive change, and simultaneously comply with current and emerging compliance legislation.

"The ideal way to enhance the service we provide to our customers is through flexible, instant and comprehensive access to information - in other words a liquid data environment," explained Bo Andersson, Enterprise Architect, SBAB. "Automating many of our day-to-day processes can help us understand more about the needs, preferences and behavior of our customers. This is designed to help the company to respond more quickly and deliver an even more rewarding service experience. We believe BEA Systems is the ideal partner to help us achieve this - they have a vast array of solutions, from the application server and portal solutions to the complete integration platforms."

SBAB evaluated different application infrastructure solutions, and chose BEA Systems based on the platform independence of the solution. BEA's strong market reputation and its size were two further supporting factors.

SBAB has a 15.3 percent share of the Swedish mortgage industry. The company has a mission to simplify and challenge the way customers choose and buy a mortgage: making the entire process as easy as buying food in a supermarket or buying a consumer product through the Internet. To achieve this, SBAB needed a solution designed to remove the barriers which lay between its core business processes - consumer mortgages, business customers, finance and administration -- and allow information to flow freely to those who need it. The other challenges are to deploy the IT solution quickly, ensure that all information remained accountable and ensure that it complied with the ever-changing rules and regulations of the business.

The answer for SBAB is a Service-Oriented Architecture. By building an infrastructure based on standard, flexible products, which adapt to business requirements, SBAB can have the flexibility to respond more rapidly to business change and create a service-centric environment. SBAB has already built a concept model with a number of small and easy-to-use services, which are now in production and generating revenue.