Enterprise Architecture for Financial Institutions

The explosive impact of Mobile, Social, Big Data and the Cloud as they pervade our daily lives is prompting a rethink of enterprise architectures. In the finance world, too, concepts like Digital Banking and Mobile Payments have been around for some time.

But what does rethinking enterprise architectures for financial institutions mean?

It means combining the enormous wealth of information and hardware resources accumulated over the years to provide new services and new ways to interact, with a seamless user experience independent of the user channel/device. Like finding information online about the benefits of a potential investment, discussing it with your adviser face to face or via virtual chat, finalising an investment proposal, digitally signing it from a tablet, and monitoring the completion and performance via Mobile.

Reply has a long history of delivering new technologies to the market, and since 2011 we have been exploring the new frontiers of mobile payment. Reply is supporting several major retail, private and corporate banks through the process of profound transformation to get current IT systems ready for digital banking.

From an Architecture perspective, that means:

• restructuring the back ends, starting by revamping/redesigning the data architecture to facilitate access to the underlying objects (customer, transactions and portfolio)
• building and exposing services to orchestrate through new cross-channel processes while maintaining their context and thus providing a seamless navigation approach
• opening up fresh channels of interaction (e.g. social) while ensuring a consistent navigation experience and clean, unambiguous information
• collecting and analysing the extraordinary amount of data generated by user behaviour to build a holistic vision of the user and hence to be more effective both in offering new services and in providing more precise real-time feedback, targeted for better customer care.