Custom Solutions Group TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES
T
ime and tide, it is said, wait for no man. Union Bank of India (UBI) discovered that the popular saying ought to be amended to accommodate money transfer transactions too. Its customers were seeking instantaneous transfer of funds — irrespective of any channel or type of processing involved. For instance, the application handling foreign inward remittances was not integrated with the bank’s core banking application, hence the e-remit transactions had to be manually processed in CBS. The difference in time zones also resulted in delays. This was impeding the speed and efficiency of the operations. All that changed when the bank implemented Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). The EAI approach has met with considerable success in recent times and that was one of the factors that prompted the bank to move to an EAI implementation. With TCS as a consultant, the bank opted for an EAI implementation based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), promoting high re-usability of the components. The loosely coupled characteristic of the framework makes it very easy to create new services or customize existing services and expose them to subscribing clients independent of the platform they are hosted on. SOA makes it possible to expose services without the clients having to deal with the internal details. The decision to implement EAI was taken in June 2010 and, over the next few months, the application was piloted on a test server. The bank procured the necessary hardware in June 2011 and the application went live soon thereafter. EAI processes the data instantly in a more secure manner and ensures prompt service. Besides the instant remittance facility, EAI brought in a slew of operational efficiencies. “EAI is allowing legacy applications to continue without major replacements /customizations. This is bringing about a lot of cost savings to the bank,” said Ajit Rath, General Manager - IT for UBI.
Processing ECS transactions used to keep staff members busy. Now they have more time to devote for their core responsibilities.” Ajit Rath General Manager - IT, UBI.
THE GENESIS The Union Bank of India (UBI) is one of the first large public sector banks in the country to have all their branches on a single core-banking platform. UBI has always looked at technology as a key facilitator to provide better customer service, and has a well-defined ‘IT strategy’ that can meet its business goals. UBI has taken rapid strides in this direction with 100% computerization of all its branches. The bank has many disparate systems catering to various business needs of the bank’s customers. UBI has also rolled out several systems and is also constantly in the process of implementing new systems. Some of the key systems include CBS implemented across all UBI Branches, Lending Automation System, Cash Management System, Document Management System, Channel Finance, HRMS, SFMS (Structured Financial Messaging System) and an integrated treasury. The bank also has multiple external interfaces with various payment channels. With a view to integrate its disparate systems on a single platform, UBI sought to have a robust middleware
It was a primary design goal that the services in the EAI gracefully handle all error conditions and that manual reconciliation be eliminated.