IBM Takes SOA to the Bank, Driving the Future of Financial Customer Service

Kuala Lumpur 29 May 2008 : IBM today announced a new industry framework for financial services that will help banks better manage and use information to increase revenue and customer retention, reduce risk, improve operational efficiency, and increase flexibility to support existing and new business strategies.The IBM Banking Framework for Customer Care and Insight is powered by a service oriented architecture (SOA) that fully exploits the capabilities of Information On Demand to develop more efficient marketing, sales and compliance strategies while providing consumers with better, faster and more personalized service.

Many financial services organizations are focused on improving relationships with their customers in order to differentiate themselves and capture market share. The new IBM Banking Framework for Customer Care and Insight enables clients to do this by helping financial organizations gain deeper insight into the customer relationship. For example, it can help identify which customers are most open to buying additional services, provide knowledge for creating multichannel, personalized marketing campaigns, or help deliver new products and services to market quickly and efficiently.

"The success of IBM's industry frameworks for retail and healthcare clearly illustrates the importance of industry specialization and its ability to deliver tangible and real business results to our clients," said Tom Hutchinson, Technical Executive and SOA Leader, Software Group . "By combining the agility of an SOA environment with a proven and integrated industry framework, IBM is able to provide our banking and financial services clients with a powerful offering that is unmatched in the industry."

IBM's industry frameworks enable clients to improve time-to-value for critical projects by building on their existing infrastructures through standards-based, proven, industry-specific expertise. As a result of this integrated framework environment, banking clients will be able to drive innovation through best practices that are shared among an established ecosystem of SOA-validated IBM Business Partners.

The new banking framework joins previously announced frameworks for the retail and healthcare sectors, which IBM unveiled in 1Q 2008. These frameworks can have an immediate impact in helping clients improve customer efficiency and service. For example, clients who have deployed the retail framework have reported that they have cut inventory shrinkage by 20 percent, increased total inventory stock and reduced out-of-stock items by 25 percent.

The new IBM Banking Framework for Customer Care and Insight is based on IBM Business Partner and IBM Global Services expertise in the financial services industry and is built on IBM software from WebSphere, Information Management, Lotus, Rational and Tivoli.

"The SOA approach gives us the flexibility and agility to quickly respond to the changing market landscape, thus ensuring a platform for innovation,” said Hugo Van Vledder, Chief Operations Officer, Mayban Fortis Holdings. “In order to meet our business goals, we need processes that can sense and respond to business needs and customer requirements. SOA is like a dictionary of services which gives a company the unique ability to adapt quickly to an ever faster changing industry environment and by doing so staying ahead of the competition"

IBM's leadership in the SOA market is further illustrated by a thriving community of greater than 120,000 architects and developers, more than 134 universities advancing the SOA curriculum, and more than 5,000 Business Partners building SOA skills, solutions, and practices. As part of its overall industry frameworks strategy, IBM is expanding this partner community with the development of a new Industry Solutions partner program. The program will allow partners to validate their applications on IBM's industry-specific frameworks and build industry solution components that target key industry needs.