Banks Should Consider Extending SOA With BPM

Banks are faced with stiff competition, rising internal costs and the need to provide more services to their customers. Traditional IT responses have been expensive, slow to market and generally target only one initiative. Technology, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), is promoted as the solution to these objectives. SOA is a required component of the systems that drive efficiency in banks. And while it creates new services for clients and helps banks become more profitable, turning technology into real value is the key.

Banks should consider extending SOA technologies with business process management (BPM) strategies. BPM engines allow for consolidation of multiple user-interaction points within a process. Further, banks can create customer-interaction points in the process that enable employees to sell banking services. Targeting new channels, banks can extend these new business processes directly to the Web and mobile devices. BPM, and the complementary components of process engineering and SOA, enable banks to drive new revenue, become more efficient and create new services to retain customers.