Today’s economies and commodity markets are swinging rapidly, barriers to global competition are disappearing, and empowered customers are changing preferences and expectations faster than businesses can respond. Historically, banking processes have been bounded by the IT systems that drive them, and integration has been implemented through batch processing and data warehousing. While adequate from a transaction processing perspective, this approach does not cater to the emerging need for horizontal integration of business processes.

From a horizontal integration perspective what becomes critical are end-to-end visibility and optimization, an integrated user experience and a robust and scalable integration environment. It is imperative that the classical finance industry computing environments such as mainframes evolve to embrace all of these capabilities. Re-architecting decades of existing solutions is simply not a viable approach, so how do we achieve end-to-end process visibility and optimization in a non-invasive fashion? The answer is that the computing environment itself, CICS, IMS etc., must provide capabilities such as business event processing and integration on the glass in a holistic fashion across vertical solution towers.

This IBM® Redguide™ publication describes the principles for smarter banking from a business perspective, and discusses how to evolve existing environments towards a smarter banking paradigm. The primary audiences are executives, leaders, and architects that need to understand how to make use of classical finance industry computing environments as smarter banking differentiators.

The need for smarter banking

End-to-end process visibility

Robust and scalable information systems

Conclusion