Akbank T.A.Ş. Speeds up Customer Information Services, Reduces Overall Costs by up to 25%
 
 

Akbank T.A.Ş. Speeds up Customer Information Services, Reduces Overall Costs by up to 25%

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Founded as a local bank in Adana, Turkey in January 1948, Akbank originally had the core objective of providing funding for local cotton producers. Traded as a public company since 1990, Akbank T.A.Ş. today enjoys a strategic partnership with Citigroup who owns a 20% equity stake in the company.

Using numerous point-to-point connections for banking applications, Akbank faced several problems inherent for these types of connections, such as complex management, difficult monitoring, frequent delays in producing connections with new requirements, and the challenges of customized application programming interfaces.

To overcome these challenges, Akbank embarked on a number of technology transformation projects in 2008 aimed at establishing more integration layers and making a transition to a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Among these projects, Akbank leveraged Oracle Enterprise Service Bus 11g to implement a loosely coupled service infrastructure, providing the mission-critical ability to integrate financial services applications with better connectivity. It also took advantage of the advanced capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g to connect between services using various protocols with bundled transports, enabling greater development speed. Overall, Akbank reduced integration development costs by up to 60%, maintenance costs related to integrations by up to 70%, and overall costs by up to 25%.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Akbank T.A.Ş.

  • “When we first used Oracle Enterprise Service Bus 11g in customer relationship management and treasury projects, we were amazed at its development speed and performance. We have now used it in more than 50 projects and have developed many proxy services in a short time. The system is processing 6 million requests per day without any performance problems.” – Mujdat Buyukteke, Enterprise Services Development Manager, Akbank T.A.Ş.

  • Reduce the high costs and advanced skills associated with establishing point-to-point connections for financial services applications—such as credit card and customer relationship management applications
  • Avoid problems encountered typically with point-to-point application connections, such as difficulty in reusability, complex and time-consuming management and maintenance, difficulty in monitoring the current connections and services, and delays in producing point-to-point connections with new requirements
  • Achieve the transition to an SOA, offering business services across platforms—on whatever platform these services are located
  • Simplify integrating heterogeneous banking applications—such as treasury, customer relationship management, credit cards, loans, deposits, customer data integrator, and merchant system—with a single solution to establish a stable IT environment

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented a loosely coupled service infrastructure with Oracle Enterprise Service Bus 11g to keep service unaffected by changes in location or technology, providing the mission-critical ability to integrate financial services applications—such as loan applications and credit card applications—with better connectivity and avoiding previous problems
  • Simplified the execution of upgrade projects, as consumer service developers do not have to develop code to comply with the service provider’s technology or message structure
  • Increased the speed of developing shared services due to the reusability of services and the simplicity of development and maintenance
  • Enabled service developers to monitor data pertaining to production services to improve performance and avoid downtime of shared services, as services supported in the production environment are expected to increase daily
  • Enabled Akbank to scale its Oracle Enterprise Service Bus 11g environment as a single integration layer upon request—both vertically and horizontally—to almost any size to accommodate services and users, with the help of clustered deployments
  • Achieved greater development speed by leveraging the simple XQuery transformation and proxy development provided by Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g to connect between services using various protocols with bundled transports
  • Enabled Akbank to use error handling and alert mechanisms to inform all service owners instantly and in detail about any problems, avoiding the need to review log files to identify reasons behind production problems
  • Leveraged Oracle Enterprise Service Bus’ data monitoring capabilities to define performance issues without losing time and having to issue service-level agreement alerts about such issues, achieving a much higher quality of service across the company
  • Made customer information services three-to-four times faster by calling provider services in parallel, covering credit card application, customer complaint, credit application, and data integrator systems
  • Reduced integration development costs by up to 60%, maintenance costs related to integrations by up to 70%, and overall costs by up to 25%
  • Enabled Akbank to generate extensible markup language (XML) schemas from common business-oriented language (COBOL) copybooks, using message format language (MFL) for two-way transformations between COBOL copybook structures and XML schemas, substantially simplifying Akbank users’ access to various operational systems
  • Achieved integration with legacy mainframe applications (for example publishing customer information control system (CICS) transactions as Web services for more than 20 operational systems)
  • Established a stable environment with no unscheduled downtime since July 2009

Partner

Akbank leveraged the technical expertise of Oracle Partner MSU Software & Consulting to establish two-way transformations between COBOL copybook structures and XML schemas, as well as to foster the development and administration of proxy services.