TECHNOLOGY
Why reliability
rests on innovative
banking systems
Outdated technology is causing banks to lose valuable ‘online time’.
The solution lies in keeping up with current global trends. By Xolisa Vuza
Xolisa Vuza
T
he South African banking
industry has suffered a spate
of technical failures recently –
the worst of which resulted in
a bank being unable to process
transactions or connect
its channels online. During these lapses,
customers have either been unable to receive
their deposited salaries on time and ensure
debit orders are transacted, or they have been
unable to log into their accounts to perform
transactions and review their account
statements. The unmistakable reality is that
this leaves many unhappy customers and the
risk of reputational damage for the bank.
Considering that we are living in an era
of ‘always on and always available’, there is a
demand for banking systems to be available
24/7 for customers to perform transactions
wherever and whenever. What, then, went
wrong? The answer lies in legacy.
In terms of computing, legacy refers to
outdated systems, programming languages
or software being used instead of available
upgraded versions. What is evident is that
most banks still deal with legacy challenges
in terms of processes, applications, or even
infrastructure.
While legacy systems support the bulk
of a bank’s processes and can be adapted to
ever-changing customer needs, they remain a
weak point because they are:
• based on old architecture;
• not documented well enough; and
• limited in terms of deployment because
of the associated costs related to running
and managing them.
One specific example is the great
dependency on mainframes. Mainframes
have been and still remain reliable processing
platforms for banks in terms of speed and
trust. A great deal of intellectual property
is embedded or built into the mainframes
and legacy systems. Yet, in most cases, this
intellectual property is undocumented
anywhere and has grown into a huge
monster that banks struggle with, or
find difficult to replace.
Legacy systems are also mostly built
incrementally, which results in issues
either on the application or infrastructure
architecture when people who have
been involved in such systems move
on. Ultimately, this poses a huge risk to
businesses that remain on
undocumented legacy.
While it is normal that systems will go
down due to unforeseen circumstances, it
is also true that systems go down because
of a lack of integrated planning and a lack
of understanding the impact of introduced
changes over a period of time.
There are three key architectural
points that banks can look at enforcing
in their environments:
1. Setting a direction. It is important for
banks to know how their architecture needs
to evolve based on trends, strategy and
competitor analysis. This will help ensure
that the bank focuses on the correct areas of
the architecture to remain relevant. Projects
that get initiated will also find a reference
point as they are part of a migration strategy
towards the future architecture, while
delivering on immediate requirements.
2. Understanding their architecture. It seems
to be human nature not to worry about
things until something goes wrong. This
leads to a lack of focus in documenting
what the architecture looks like (and what it
will look like) as a result of project impacts.
I have seen instances where deployments
are done and something goes wrong, and no
one knows what things looked like before
deployment. There are many levels where
this can be documented.
3. Evolving their architecture. Any
architecture should evolve with the times,
depending on trends, changing customer
patterns and demands, changing technology
styles and even new ways of doing things
that make sense to adopt. These should
always be taken into account when evolving
the architecture.
Banking has evolved to a state where
customers can do all of their banking via
mobile or internet banking. Surely it’s time
that architecture evolves to a point that it
improves reliability and the customers’
needs too?
Xolisa Vuza is the Senior Solutions Architect at
Ovations Group.
Edition 12 | BANKERSA
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2014/12/18 10:16 AM