IBS Journal February 2015
FIS starts to implement new components as its renewal plans take shape
FIS has made strides of late with its plans to gradually renew its wide range of financial services appli- cations. It has introduced an initial component into its US bureau busi- ness, cutting over with the customer management element in one large data centre. This is for the service underpinned by its Integrated Bank- ing System (IBS), which is FIS’s plat- form for mid- to upper-tier domes- tic banks. The supplier’s strategy is to ulti-
mately apply such common com- ponents to all of its core systems as a route to a phased renewal. Next are pricing and product cata- logue components, with these now being implemented. IBS is derived from FIS’s takeover of Metavante. As well as IBS, an early focus will be on applying the components to the Sanchez-derived core system, Profile, which is used in the US as well as on the international market. FIS’s Glen Sonsalla, VP, technology
Financial Exchange (IFX) function- ality.
One area of focus with both Bruce Jennings, FIS For payments, the offerings of Clear-
strategy director, is keen to emphasise that FIS hasn’t merely picked one of its systems to use as the basis to replace its other platforms. ‘It is not an exercise by FIS of picking one of our nine core platforms and saying, that’s the best one, that’s the winner. We are taking the best pieces and parts.’ Nevertheless, it was clear from the outset that its newer Java-based Corebank had a major role to play, with this forming the starting point for the early compo- nents. Corebank was developed by SDC, the IT subsidiary of the Danish savings banks, in the first half of the 1990s, work- ing with IBM, and a version still under- pins SDC’s bureau service. Under FIS, the system has not lived up to expectations, gaining few takers and having failed pro- jects at a couple of the banks that did sign, including Turkey-based Isbank. FIS has been working on the strategy
for around five years. In fact, going much further back, FIS was talking about an ‘Enterprise Customer’ component, derived from Corebank, being live at one user of another of its old core mainframe-based systems, Systematics.
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2Pay, the Belgian supplier that was acquired last year, will also have a role to play. Clear2Pay has ‘really good assets’, says Sonsalla, ‘and we can take that and modernise the FIS payment space’. The goal is a converged payments platform for consumer and commercial payments. For the core systems renewal, the cus-
tomer was the obvious place to start, says Bruce Jennings, VP, international strate- gic development. ‘If you can orchestrate the customer outside the core, then you can switch off that functionality in the core.’ The customer component can then support multiple systems. It is a similar philosophy for pricing and the product catalogue.
FIS is also applying the component
approach to its front-end offerings, where Touchpoint is its long-standing chan- nels flagship. The process is described as primarily one of rewriting functional- ity and reintroducing it into the existing platforms. The same is happening with the Xpress middle office integration layer which came from the Profile camp and has become a common layer across a range of FIS back-ends. Jennings says Xpress has been ‘thinned out a bit’ and the func- tionality is being reworked as business objects, in place of the legacy Interactive
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Touchpoint and Xpress is business process management (BPM), where the previous ‘case management’ type workflow is being replaced by full BPM, initially with support for the open source JBPM offering but with support for others to follow. The industry body that has been building financial sector web servic- es for several years, BIAN, has had a role to play in the work, so too IBM’s FSDM data model, says Jennings (the latter was used as a basis for the design of Corebank). Not surprising- ly, FIS is putting a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) spin on the strat- egy.
For other FIS systems, includ-
ing its high-end US-centric lending sys- tem, ALS, and syndicated lending plat- form, ACBS, there is similarly a component approach. Xpress has already been applied to some of the outlying systems, provid- ing ‘a nice veneer to ALS, for example’, says Adrian Sturley, head of global banking solutions. For other assorted systems, such as the German Kordoba-derived core sys- tem, K-Core24, and wealth management system, KGS, Sonsalla says there are ‘early conversations’. The strategy is starting to be brought
into sales conversations, says Sturley, and is playing well, constituting a more orderly manner in which to replace the back office. There are also conversations with existing customers, an example being a Systemat- ics user in Peru (there are a couple here) that is looking at how it can be more agile. Among other existing customers that are engaged with the strategy, three are cited in the US, comprising long-standing Sys- tematics user, Citibank, another System- atics user, Bank Leumi, which has a focus on the customer component, and Chica- go-based Northern Trust. In many ways, FIS’s component
approach is no surprise, given the large mix of systems within the company. It claims customers in 142 countries and is seeking a way to retain these.
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