Business Challenge

Federal Bank is using over 30 retail banking related applications from various vendors including Infosys Core banking platform FINACLE running on mixture of hardware including IBM AIX servers. As part of their expansion plans to increase the number of value-added services to its customers, the Bank wanted to provide near real-time availability of foreign exchange remittances through SWIFT. In addition, they had ambitious plans to extend their offering to build a multichannel payment gateway, expand their kiosk facilities and ATM network.

Their IT team realized that integration with multiple partners of SWIFT would require monumental investments in hardware, software and consulting efforts, putting their entire project behind schedule. The point-to-point nature of connections between these different applications would make the scalability and management of such a system a challenge and introduce multiple security vulnerabilities. Such a system would fall short of enterprise performance, reliability, scalability and affordability goals of the Bank. Three main challenges were identified:

Time to Market for new Services - Delivering new services to market as fast as they wanted was an immediate goal. Integration with multiple partners in the current system would take months to implement and deploy. Software asset reuse would be severely limited, adding a layer of costs and increased time to market.

Reliability & Security - Implementing a point-to-point type of network as many other banks had chosen would expose their network to multiple points of vulnerability and in the long term the rigidity of the system could become its Achilles heel, undermining the Bank's competitiveness in a rapidly changing environment.

High Total cost of ownership - Federal Bank measured their return on investment along two vectors - direct costs & indirect benefits. While the requirement to add more hardware to accommodate newer functionality increased direct costs, meeting customer requirements and attending to system downtimes added to indirect costs and time overruns.