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Industry: Financial Services
Deployment Country: Ireland
Solution: Secure SOA to enable EBS Building Society Service Oriented Architecture communicate with independent brokers and 3rd party banking and insurance firms
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"
The strongest approach was to embed security within the services infrastructure itself, provide consistent security policy enforcement and to protect all endpoints, not just the perimeter."
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David Yeates,
Head of IT,
EBS
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Introduction:
EBS Building Society, based in Dublin, Ireland, is the fifth largest retail credit institution in Ireland with total assets under management of over €16 billion. It offers a broad range of banking, mortgage, saving and investment products and has over 400,000 members. EBS has been providing home loans to these members since 1935 and today commands in excess of a 10 per cent share of the €26 billion Irish home loan market.
Business Objective - Extend reseller network/ greater cost savings/reduce time to market:
EBS sought to strengthen its reseller network of brokers in order to increase its market share of a burgeoning residential and commercial mortgate market. By implementing an SOA solution, EBS and the brokers would be able to exchange XML-formatted information in simple transactions to save on overall administration costs, accelerate the roll out new products and ultimately reduce the critical metric of the turnaround time for loan approval. The SOA would also facilitate improved communications with other financial institutions such as insurance companies providing protection for home loans and rival banks whose customers wanted to switch to EBS.
Technical Challenge:
A critical technical requirement was the need to enforce identity-based access controls to ensure that only authorized internal and external users were permitted access to the EBS services and products. Finally, in order to maximize its investment in the IBM WebSphere infrastructure, EBS needed to put in place a product capable of managing and scaling to the long term business needs for improved processing times, roll out of new services, extension of the partner and customer trading network.
Benefits:
Re-use the existing security infrastructure obtaining greater return on assets -
avoid the cost and extra management complexity of new "silos" of users and policies. The solution allows users management and policy management to be common across both Web browser traffic and XML Web Services traffic.
Complement the corporate strategy of a Customer-centric approach -
Vordel enables EBS to extend its mortgage services to new partners and end-customers. Without the strong authentication, authorization and evidential audit trail, this would be impossible.
Reduced development costs and faster time to market to existing and new markets -
With Vordel Director, EBS has the flexibility to update all policies centrally, implement software upgrades without hard coding and without firmware upgrades, and can easily scale the application of policies to new partners and customers as they gain increased market share.
Comply with Financial Services regulatory guidelines for auditing and non-repudiation -
the use of strong authentication and authorization, as well as keeping an audit trail of all transactions, ensures EBS is able to comply with regulatory requirements.
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