Original article published on NAB Tech Blog
When automatic teller machines (ATMs) started appearing in the late 1960s, there was a sense that we’d taken our first real step into the future of electronic banking.
As people discovered the freedom to access cash at all hours on demand and the convenience of card payments began to gradually replace cash, a golden era of mainframe computing helped banks manage the rising volume of financial transactions.
Jump forward to 2018 and most of our dollars are now dispensed digitally (through shopfronts real and virtual), as trips to the ATM rapidly become a thing of the past.
As banks, we’ve successfully evolved our systems and technology to meet customers’ fundamental needs, and they now feel very comfortable with the digital representation of money. But customer expectations have evolved far beyond these basics.
The truth is that many banks are only just waking up to the next revolution in their sector, and I predict that developments in coming years could well be just as disruptive as the rise of electronic banking.
Some drivers of this are evident in the rise of fintech start-ups developing innovative financial tools and services increasingly relying on real-time data. Of course, examples of cross-subsidization and regulatory arbitrage can be readily found as well in the fintech sphere.
Many fintechs do not attempt to replace the core services traditional banks provide, but augment their value proposition. These can only succeed, however, if bank platforms are open enough to allow API-based integration, event-based pub/sub data exchange and other modern approaches to creating flexible, extensible ecosystems.
The question is, how do system architects (who’ve focused so much of their work on the protection of customers’ financial assets) now set about opening these systems up to the wider world?
The scale of the task is significant.
The foundation of a lot of today’s banking architecture is built on a giant network of tightly coupled legacy systems, each purpose-built for very specific business needs, with layers of bespoke integration and security, risk management and control implementations embedded throughout them.
Many of those systems took years to evaluate and implement, but now the race is on to replace them with far more open, flexible and agile ecosystems — all while retaining the robustness and security needed to beat ever-more-sophisticated financial crime and fraud.
Defending our customers’ assets is a massive job in itself — and not one we can afford to fail. So, how do we transform our banking systems without sacrificing our role as economic guardians?
A robust, coherent and ambitious architectural vision is crucial in the transformation.
Modern architectural approaches are not new but sometimes take surprising time to become well-established within our industry as best practices. Services replacing monolithic applications, improving loose coupling via event pub/sub and avoiding distributed monoliths, employing eventual consistency where appropriate to improve availability and resilience to partial failures, reactive patterns, establishing coherent API ecosystems are hardly new but require experience to get right and avoid pitfalls. Increasingly, CQRS, event sourcing and real-time stream processing provide powerful ways to move the needle still further.
Systems, software and enterprise architecture should be about how internals of the systems work, translating into how resilient, performant and scalable they are, not just what functional features they provide. It’s very much about what’s under the hood. However, in many institutions the practice has been focused on buying and integrating technologies, systems and applications rather than designing and building them.
Starting with a coherent strategy and set of architectural principles aiming to maximize flexibility, maintain resilience and security, yet accommodate increasing velocity of change and easier experimentation the business demands at the edge, is key. These principles are translated into a concise set of patterns, technology choices and reference implementations providing reliable guardrails to individual delivery teams aiming to maximize their velocity.
We should evaluate all systems — existing or new — according to these key principles and patterns, so none becomes an obstacle in achieving a flexible technology ecosystem.
Anything blocking or impeding movement toward our agreed target states definitionally becomes technical debt, to be managed proactively. Applied consistently, it also gives us a model to phase out legacy estates where it’s an obstacle to our goals.
As is true for any organization — whether a startup or a large firm — the people we choose to drive our technological journey are as important as the architecture that supports it.
Financial services are experiencing a truly seismic shift, as we seek to solve some fundamentally complex problems with innovative ideas and best-of-breed tools.
And technology as a field is continuing to undergo rapid evolution, offering us new tools and choices, whether it be stream processing underpinning the transition from Big Data to Fast Data, machine learning utilizing GPU compute, or quantum computing promising solutions to previously computationally intractable problems at a price of upsetting the status quo in cryptography. It is a great time to be a practitioner in our field.
Distilling the right set of architectural principles and patterns and picking our technology building blocks wisely, tying these together into a coherent architectural vision in our complex, fast-evolving ecosystem — where failure simply isn’t an option — represents an exciting career challenge indeed.
If you’re interested in joining us, you can learn more about working in technology at NAB here.
How can large retail banks tackle the monumental challenge of modernising core systems architecture without sacrificing their role as economic guardians?
When automatic teller machines (ATMs) started appearing in the late 1960s, there was a sense that we’d taken our first real step into the future of electronic banking.
As people discovered the freedom to access cash at all hours on demand and the convenience of card payments began to gradually replace cash, a golden era of mainframe computing helped banks manage the rising volume of financial transactions.
Jump forward to 2018 and most of our dollars are now dispensed digitally (through shopfronts real and virtual), as trips to the ATM rapidly become a thing of the past.
As banks, we’ve successfully evolved our systems and technology to meet customers’ fundamental needs, and they now feel very comfortable with the digital representation of money. But customer expectations have evolved far beyond these basics.
The next revolution
The truth is that many banks are only just waking up to the next revolution in their sector, and I predict that developments in coming years could well be just as disruptive as the rise of electronic banking.
Some drivers of this are evident in the rise of fintech start-ups developing innovative financial tools and services increasingly relying on real-time data. Of course, examples of cross-subsidization and regulatory arbitrage can be readily found as well in the fintech sphere.
Many fintechs do not attempt to replace the core services traditional banks provide, but augment their value proposition. These can only succeed, however, if bank platforms are open enough to allow API-based integration, event-based pub/sub data exchange and other modern approaches to creating flexible, extensible ecosystems.
The question is, how do system architects (who’ve focused so much of their work on the protection of customers’ financial assets) now set about opening these systems up to the wider world?
The scale of the task is significant.
The foundation of a lot of today’s banking architecture is built on a giant network of tightly coupled legacy systems, each purpose-built for very specific business needs, with layers of bespoke integration and security, risk management and control implementations embedded throughout them.
Many of those systems took years to evaluate and implement, but now the race is on to replace them with far more open, flexible and agile ecosystems — all while retaining the robustness and security needed to beat ever-more-sophisticated financial crime and fraud.
Defending our customers’ assets is a massive job in itself — and not one we can afford to fail. So, how do we transform our banking systems without sacrificing our role as economic guardians?
A robust, coherent and ambitious architectural vision is crucial in the transformation.
Thinking big
Modern architectural approaches are not new but sometimes take surprising time to become well-established within our industry as best practices. Services replacing monolithic applications, improving loose coupling via event pub/sub and avoiding distributed monoliths, employing eventual consistency where appropriate to improve availability and resilience to partial failures, reactive patterns, establishing coherent API ecosystems are hardly new but require experience to get right and avoid pitfalls. Increasingly, CQRS, event sourcing and real-time stream processing provide powerful ways to move the needle still further.
Systems, software and enterprise architecture should be about how internals of the systems work, translating into how resilient, performant and scalable they are, not just what functional features they provide. It’s very much about what’s under the hood. However, in many institutions the practice has been focused on buying and integrating technologies, systems and applications rather than designing and building them.
Starting with a coherent strategy and set of architectural principles aiming to maximize flexibility, maintain resilience and security, yet accommodate increasing velocity of change and easier experimentation the business demands at the edge, is key. These principles are translated into a concise set of patterns, technology choices and reference implementations providing reliable guardrails to individual delivery teams aiming to maximize their velocity.
We should evaluate all systems — existing or new — according to these key principles and patterns, so none becomes an obstacle in achieving a flexible technology ecosystem.
Anything blocking or impeding movement toward our agreed target states definitionally becomes technical debt, to be managed proactively. Applied consistently, it also gives us a model to phase out legacy estates where it’s an obstacle to our goals.
People power
As is true for any organization — whether a startup or a large firm — the people we choose to drive our technological journey are as important as the architecture that supports it.
Financial services are experiencing a truly seismic shift, as we seek to solve some fundamentally complex problems with innovative ideas and best-of-breed tools.
And technology as a field is continuing to undergo rapid evolution, offering us new tools and choices, whether it be stream processing underpinning the transition from Big Data to Fast Data, machine learning utilizing GPU compute, or quantum computing promising solutions to previously computationally intractable problems at a price of upsetting the status quo in cryptography. It is a great time to be a practitioner in our field.
Distilling the right set of architectural principles and patterns and picking our technology building blocks wisely, tying these together into a coherent architectural vision in our complex, fast-evolving ecosystem — where failure simply isn’t an option — represents an exciting career challenge indeed.
If you’re interested in joining us, you can learn more about working in technology at NAB here.
