The digital bank –
architechting the
future of banking
The digital bank’s technology design is based on key guiding principles that serve
as the basis for selecting architectural constructs and technologies. By Gys Hyman
The technological architectural design
underpinning the digital bank will move away
from complexity. The establishment of flexible
technology architecture is the first step towards
the establishment of the componentised
foundation for execution.
DIGITAL ENABLEMENT
As the bank’s core products are replaced
by digital intellectual property and digital
products, it is essential that customers can
engage these in a frictionless way, across the
whole value chain. This engagement must have
the ability to take place at any time, through
any medium and occur from most locations.
This gives rise to the concept of an
omni-channel, which is not aligned to any
single product or service, or rooted in any
specific customer context. This, combined
with the requirement to service the customer,
has given rise to the need to develop apps
that run natively on smart devices. Native
app development and deployment will lead
to improved performance and will unlock
customers’ location-based information,
allowing the bank to position products in
their customer’s locational context.
Gys Hyman
COMPONENTISED FOUNDATION OF
EXECUTION
Simplification is key for businesses of the
future. Most banks (barring new entrants)
are constrained by the complexity
and overhead of legacy processes and
technology that have accumulated over
time, ultimately yielding a frustrated
customer experience and the bank’s
ability to react and engage new market
opportunities timeously.
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CLOUD ADOPTION
The componentised foundation for execution
needs to be deployed to a hybrid combination
of cloud-based platforms, making use of a
combination of on-premise, Infrastructure-asa-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Softwareas-a-Service platforms. This stems from the
need to move toward a high performance, best
practice, highly scalable, pay-for-use IT model.
Traditionally, underlying technology
resources were made available to banking
systems based on the cyclic peak volume
demands (such as month-end runs), which
has introduced run-time cost inefficiencies, as
these resources remain underutilised for the
majority of the time outside of peak periods.
The elasticity of cloud allows for expansion
and contraction of these underlying resources,
based on the need at that moment.
In addition to meeting the on-demand
availability requirements of the digital bank,
the cloud model offers optimised performance.
Deloitte’s recent benchmark of the performance
of a cloud-based e-wallet solution showed
23 million transactions were processed within
an hour. Throughout this process, 1 500 servers
were allocated to this run. The cost of the run
was only based on the duration of use of these
servers, and no more.
CLOUD ORCHESTRATION
Cloud orchestration enables the orchestration
of processes beyond the limits of where the
systems reside, offering extensibility, portability
and reliability.
Extensibility refers to the ability to get
the digital bank’s information in and out
of the service, portability represents the
ease of migrating the bank’s information
from the cloud service, and reliability
addresses performance of the service. Cloud
orchestration is fundamental in effecting
agility, as it enables the ability to “plug and
play” services into the digital bank’s
component-based technological architecture.
One of the perceived risks to cloud adoption
is data security, specifically when dealing with
customer data storage. C