Rising to the Challenge: Integrating COBOL and XML Systems at Deutsche Bank Luxembourg
In the banking world, the key to delivering world-class client service is providing fast and secure financial transactions for your customers. To power these extensive monetary exchanges, banks require high-performance IT solutions that will expedite transactions in a reliable manner. But integrating disparate technologies and varying institutional standards can hinder that information flow.
For Deutsche Bank Luxembourg IT systems are critical to the business. To build applications that will facilitate and drive faster, efficient financial transactions, the bank needed to seamlessly integrate disparate platforms on a local and on a global basis.
In an effort to improve customer satisfaction levels, Deutsche Bank Luxembourg aimed to integrate a new portfolio management system and facilitate and expedite secure, accessible financial transactions. To do so, the company needed technology that would seamlessly integrate its existing IT on a local and global basis across disparate systems, including an XML interface medium.
The activities of Deutsche Bank Luxembourg are based on three main pillars – private banking, international loans and treasury and global markets. The need for a strategic, standards-based integration led Deutsche Bank Luxembourg to adopt XML as an interface medium for new data interchange requirements. However, because the majority of today’s banks’ core systems are written in COBOL, Deutsche Bank Luxembourg required a technology solution to ensure interoperability between XML and COBOL. After extensive research Deutsche Bank chose an application from UK-based software provider Micro Focus. The application was the ‘Net Express Early Adopter Program’.
“At first sight, integrating XML and COBOL seemed rather bold,” said Roger Engel, vice president and head of the IT development team at Deutsche Bank Luxembourg. He added that at the time they weren’t sure it if was even possible. “Just when we were wondering if such a thing could be done successfully, Micro Focus introduced an XML solution from its ‘Net Express Early Adopter Program.'” This program he said allowed them to proceed with the integration.
The integration project that Deutsche Bank Luxembourg had in mind was by no means easy. In essence the project consisted of combining a COBOL-based securities ordering and routing system, with a UNIX-based portfolio management system. Deutsche Bank had developed a Windows-based COBOL application called Mozart, for inputting, processing, reporting and routing securities orders. They wanted to be able to combine this system with a third-party UNIX-based system for portfolio management for managing bulk securities transactions.
Not only was Deutsche Bank Luxembourg looking to achieve interoperability between these two systems, but they were also seeking a flexible, forward-looking solution to facilitate communication between Mozart and the bank’s other systems. Deutsche Bank Luxembourg works with a range of different systems from both internal and external suppliers, based on different standards and platforms. These systems include Kondor+ (Reuters’ treasury traders platform), SWIFT, Direct Orders (a Deutsche Bank ordering system) and IBP (the ‘International Banking Package’ as general ledger system).
Within this heterogeneous infrastructure, Mozart was a vital application. The Deutsche Bank Luxembourg staff use the system for the input, processing, reporting and routing of financial instruments, such as money market, foreign exchange, securities ordering and payment transactions. But while Mozart was effective and efficient it needed to work smoothly and efficiently with the bank’s other applications. For this purpose, the bank had already implemented ‘point to point’ interoperability between Mozart and each of the systems via individual interfaces.
Since many of those interfaces were already developed, the flexibility and standardization of XML as a medium for data interchange, within enterprises and across the Internet, made it an ideal medium for delivering interoperability in a standards-based way. Deutsche Bank Luxembourg’s IT department realized that it needed XML for a number of reasons – not least to reduce implementation costs of future integration projects. They also wanted an XML platform to deliver improved capabilities more quickly in the future and to reduce deployment costs. Finally they believed that an XML-based system would lower the total cost of ownership for the entire application and would reduce annual operating costs per transaction while also allowing them to use ‘state -of the art’ technologies for data exchange.
Using the Micro Focus application provided Deutsche Bank Luxembourg with a high-level COBOL-orientated approach to the problem. It provided a mechanism for the creation, consumption and updating of XML documents from a COBOL program. Based on COBOL file handling syntax, XML-orientated extensions allow for the handling of dynamic XML documents and XML features, such as namespaces and attributes, while wizards map XML schemas to and from COBOL data definitions.
Engel says that the bank was enthusiastic about the Micro Focus solution and adds that that the COBOL-orientated syntax approach allowed the banks programmers to feel at home in the new framework almost immediately while they got used to the XML environment.
In a matter of weeks, Deutsche Bank Luxembourg was able to create a new XML I/O*module in COBOL that consumed the XML document, fed that data through to the Mozart system and then when Mozart had completed the transaction, updated the XML document for return to RPMS. This enabled Deutsche Bank Luxembourg to quickly integrate the new RPMS package with Mozart, facilitating the consistent and timely processing of bulk portfolio transaction requirements, while also reusing the strategic investment and logic within the Mozart system.
The integration has been successful for Deutsche Bank Luxembourg where automating the financial transaction process has increased efficiency. But more importantly, according to Engel, the integration process has achieved its goal of helping to improve customer satisfaction and retention. Looking ahead Deutsche Bank Luxembourg is already considering it’s next COBOL move – and says that it plans to look at the development of web services.
* I/O refers to Input/Output, which typically refers to sending data to and from devices