Scotiabank, iWay SOA Projects To Help Generate $250 Million in Sales 
Scotiabank, one of Canada’s largest retail banks, is improving efficiencies, customer service and revenues thanks to a major SOA initiative aimed at automation, integration and data sharing. IDN talks with bank execs about their SOA projects, powered by iWay Software, and how they will help generate up to $250 million in new businesses.
Scotiabank, one of Canada’s largest retail banks, is improving efficiencies, customer service and revenues thanks to a major SOA initiative aimed at automation, integration and data sharing.
Scotiabank’s enterprise-wide SOA solutions, powered by iWay Software, embrace more than 20 internal IT systems and 1,024 local bank branches. As a result, it needed to be scalable, reliable and able to derive insight from multiple databases and applications, Martine Lamoureux Scotiabank’s vice president of development for core banking technology, told IDN.
“As we saw it, our task was to consolidate and organize information the way [the business] wanted it,” Lamoureux said. With so many systems and entry points for that data, the ability to surface, extract and synthesize data from different systems radically changed IT’s view of how – and when – to think of integration, she added. Scotiabank execs expect its SOA initiatives will help generate $250 million in new sales, and millions to Scotiabank’s profits.
“Before this project, integration was an afterthought. But, we saw how SOA and integration could let us more quickly extract data from different systems and synthesize that data across all of them,” said David Woolley, Scotiabank’s director of application integration services. “Our new SOA capabilities and new best practices have helped us meet business needs more quickly and boost our own efficiencies in IT – and all that has improved the overall business.”
Scotiabank’s SOA success would rely on both backend architecture and front-end user information, Lamoureux added. Among the bank’s goals:
- To promote more accurate and rapid data sharing that would help produce a richer set of customizable end-user reports
- To better automate core banking operations and integrate processes across different products, services and even different customer channels
- To speed delivery of new requests for projects, and reports from business users
- To abstract the business rules away from underlying application-specific systems, and simplify how such rules are updated
Scotiabank uses the iWay as its universal integration layer. Driven by the iWay Enterprise Service Bus, iWay Service Manager and iWay Managed File Transfer, this layer automates multi-step integration scenarios with complete auditing, notification, and security. It also provides a fully redundant enterprise topology with automatic failover.
The iWay ESB lays the foundation for real-time integration, web-oriented architecture, and event-driven architecture, and enables Scotiabank to create, compose, and manage services. As a result, financial, product, and sales data is moved through the integration layer via web services interfaces, batch interfaces, and interactive data-input procedures. More than simply moving packets to different endpoints or applications, the iWay layer also transforms data into a common format and loads it into a data warehouse.
On the business side, the SOA infrastructure enabled Scotiabank to improve the automated capabilities of its CRM and related systems to provide business users deeper and faster visibility and intelligence into customer actions. In turn, this has resulted in better alignment between customer needs and the bank’s product mix, and boosted revenues, sales and new business.
In specific, Scotiabank’s iWay SOA environment is letting the company increase cross-selling, track complex sales-results rules and even share business-critical data among its retail, small business, and wealth management banking lines of business.
David Woolley
Director of Application
Integration Services
Scotiabank
Inside Scotiabank’s SOA Journey
And Their Profits-Oriented Agenda
Scotiabank’s SOA journey started at the same place many SOA projects begin: The current systems cause too much pain (to business and IT) to simply put band-aids on.
“We had an inflexible point-to-point system for getting data from one system to another,” Lamoureux told IDN. “It was cumbersome and slow, but worse, it wasn’t always reliable. Oftentimes, we’d need to do manual cut-and-paste across systems to get data from one to another.”
To begin, Scotiabank used iWay Service Manager to smooth data sharing and integration across its systems, by creating reusable interfaces among all these systems. Once these reusable interfaces were in place, iWay DataMigrator could automate bulk data movement among systems and across channels, and align that data with different source/target requirements and formats.
The end result is a boon to both business and IT, Scotiabank’s Woolley added. “Using iWay, we’ve created an operational database that is accurate, reliable and up-to-date and that can extract data into any system without any manual steps.” For IT, this meant “iWay decreased our overall number of point-to-point interfaces, which is a big time-saver for our developers,” he added.
With a loosely-coupled SOA environment, iWay can share and transpose information from multiple databases and banking systems, and create an always-updated consolidated centralized database. This database, in turns, feeds Scotiabank applications.
And, SOA has also changed how Scotiabank IT sets out to deliver new applications. Now, the first step for IT is to design the new project to reuse SOA interfaces or infrastructure, whenever possible. This is a change from when IT would set out to design and build an application from scratch and then look at integrating it later. “Over time we are creating more and more standardized interfaces based on our iWay integration gateway,” Woolley said.
Among Scotiabank’s most noteworthy SOA benefits are:
Automation. One of Scotiabank’s most nagging problems was just how much data was manually entered or re-entered into systems. This led not only to data entry errors, but also drove inconsistent results because different staffers might interpret business rules inconsistently across the bank’s 1,024 branches.
Data Integration, Correlation. iWay Service Manager correlates information from IMS, VSAM, Oracle, and DB2 databases. It created data interfaces to access the data, and transposed the data into a common relational format.
This capability lets Scotiabank place data into distinct “event tables” in DB2 database. These “event tables” are used by the iWay DataMigrator to populate a datahub that provides common data to various sales, customer and marketing staff to generate custom reports on the bank’s most important lines of business – credit cards, credit lines, mortgages, and investments lines of business. No extra coding was required, as iWay provides transformation flows and visual tooling. The iWay Service Manager was used to create data interfaces to populate and update the datahub.
Data Quality. Beyond the automatic features to help populate their datahub, Lamoureux said their new SOA Best Practice of looking at integration up front has also helped improve data quality.
“Today, we do a lot more data mapping, so we get to review lots of documents and ask the business users ‘What does this field mean?’” she told IDN. “This lets us better understand our data and expose the semantics of what the data means, where that will help sharing and integration. This really turns data into knowledge.”
Business-Friendly Reporting. Scotiabank’s challenge was to automate the sales activities of the sales staff so reports could be more rapidly created and also more accurate. The bank’s SOA architecture lets users automatically track activity on each customer, and link that to an opportunity in either real-time or batch, Lamoureux said.This auto reporting saves the bank 75,000 man hours per year, and also ensures their data is more consistent and trustworthy.
Adaptable Business Rules. Prior to SOA, Scotiabank IT needed to make changes in as many as 15 to 20 systems to change a business rule. Now, such rules can be updated by simply changing business logic at the mid-tier via a web-based interface. This resulted in better consistency and improved reporting.
Using iWay’s Business Rules Engine and iWay Complex Event Processing, Scotiabank designed some 500 rules to automate and govern some complex processes and tasks, such as compensation for sales staff. iWay helps the bank design and unbundle the rules from underlying business applications, lets systems access rules from a standard XML process flow, and allows rules to be dynamically added or changed without touching any business applications.
Improved Business-to-IT Alignment. With iWay’s help, Scotiabank also created a Center of Expertise (CoE) to promote best practices for using its SOA infrastructure.
“That’s an organization we’ve never had before,” Lamoureux said. “This group is seen as valuable throughout the bank for two main reasons.” She described them both: Because of SOA reuse, Scotiabank’s IT group can engage in many more projects at the same time, and even bridge different projects together.
Scotiabank is leveraging iWay’s ability to perform many types of integration scenarios, including extracting, transforming, and loading data; handling sophisticated file transfers; monitoring business activity; or managing complex business rules.
The bank is already exploring new SOA capability. Scotiabank plans to use iWay BAM (business activity monitoring) technology to automatically update its sales reports as key events occur. For bank-wide data quality, the bank is also exploring using iWay Data Quality Center to improve accuracy of customer data and simplify regulatory issues.
