The following
is a recent discussion between Livio Varisco and Roberto Licandro
at B-Source SA in Lugano, Switzerland and TSI Project Managers.
Please describe your organization.
B-Source
(formerly Boss Lab) is a Swiss company specializing in
providing IT services and Bank Back - Office
services to banks and insurance companies by
means of an "outsourcing business model".
B-Source provides these services to clients
in Switzerland and abroad.
Value proposition,
our services
- Business
Service Provisioning (BSP): B-Source’s - and third-party
- banking software that is operated
by us in our two data centers and B-Source’s bank
back office administration services
that are performed by us "on behalf of the bank".
- Application
Service Provisioning (ASP): B-Source’s
- and third-party - banking software
that is operated by us at our two data centers.
- Operations
Service Provisioning (OSP): B-Source’s
data center services.
Our target market
- Banks,
in private banking and asset management,
in Switzerland and their international affiliates,
branches, and/or partners.
- Retail
banks in Switzerland.
- Insurance
companies.
Certifications
and credentials
- All
B-Source services are compliant with the
Swiss Federal Banking Commission legislation
rules and standards and are certified by
external auditors each year.
- Two
data centers in Lugano and Zurich secure business
continuity.
- ISO
9001 certification for the entire company,
including the ASP and BSP processes.
- CMMI
level 2 certification for software application
development in progress.
- Core
partner of the Competence Center Sourcing
at the University of St. Gallen’s
Institute for Information Management
Who does the application
currently support?
Our
Banking Operations Support System - an integrated banking system
that supports most of a bank’s front- and back-office activities,
from loan and securities processing to marketing
and internal audit in a multi-language, multi-currency,
multi-regulation, and multi-legislation environment.
Can you elaborate
on the Database and File environment for the application?
Our core system
is integrated in a core database where all operations are executed
and the data is stored. We developed interfaces to connect our system
to third party solutions or external financial data providers (i.e.,
SWIFT, SIC, SIS, Reuters).
Please describe
the business objective for the application?
- Entirely
covers the private and retail banking requirements
- Fully
integrated with the Swiss and international
banking community and Swiss FBC laws
- Fast
and cost effective implementation
- Highly
automated back-office functions
- One
single and consistent data view (operations
and MIS are equivalent)
- Parameter-driven
process support
Please describe
the target RDBMS (ORACLE, DB2, SQL Server, etc.)?
To
better support data integration and the analytical
platform, we designed and implemented an architecture
based on a Operational Staging Area (OSA) and
an Operational Data Store (ODS). These solutions
are using an ORACLE 9i RDBMS.
Please describe
your core application at B-Source SA?
The
following diagram shows how our services portfolio
is composed:
- Environment & central
information file
- Accounting
- Securities & derivatives
- Portfolio
Performance
- Commercial
transactions
- Bank’s
own portfolio
- Money
transfer and "Teller light"
- Printing
output management
- Forex & treasury
- Financial
derivatives
- Reconciliation
- Management
Information System
- Loans & collateral
- Internal
auditing
- Money
market
- Fiduciary
deposits
How did/does
tRelational and DPS factor in the success of the OSA/ODS Project?
tRelational
and DPS are the tools that allowed us to
reach our goals in a pragmatic and non-invasive
way.
The concept and
architecture underlying tRelational and DPS are very smart because
they do not work directly on the database nucleus, but use the standard
database recovery support instead. This avoids burdening the nucleus,
and thus not to affect the performance of the operating database,
as shown in the diagram above. For example, a job running every
two hours for a few minutes to propagate the updates would never
burden the system in a significant way.
How many customers
do you support?
Currently
we offer our services in the different mentioned
models to fifteen customers.
Please describe
the project and how you arrived at the selection of the TSI product
solution?
The
data integration from the core banking engine
into other data management systems (e.g., RDBMS,
flat files) was done by using scheduled programs
that run during the batch. This solution, which
eventually grew over time, became difficult
to maintain in terms of the required human
and infrastructure resources. Moreover, we
are convinced that an RDBMS and the SQL language
are better solutions to support DB inspections
and extractions with common tools. Therefore,
we implemented the following architecture as
shown in the following diagram:
What were/are the
most challenging aspects of the OSA/ODS Project?
The
two main challenges were:
- Selection
of an ETL tool capable of directly extracting
data from the database engine in an easy,
performing, robust and secure way.
- The
short time to perform a Proof of Concept
with the selected tools and the implementation
of a productive solution.
Are you satisfied
with the products, support, and services TSI provides?
Yes.
Thanks to the professional support of TSI,
in particular Mr. Hans-Peter Will, we have
been able to perform the Proof of Concept and
the installation into the production environment
in a very short time.
But
also afterwards we appreciated TSI's support
for the education and for the solution definition.
The product was tuned during the set-up phase
with quick adjustment interventions. Since
we went into production (September 2004) we
have not to face problems due to the products,
whose stability and performance allow extracting
a 2-hour online PLOG, and upload it to ORACLE
in a few minutes.
DPS
FactSheet (English)
tRelational/DPS
Presentation