Danversbank, of Danvers, Mass., a $1.1 billion financial services institution serving northeastern Massachusetts, and Information Technology Inc. (ITI), a unit of Fiserv, have collaborated on several projects in the past. The bank is a user of ITI’s Premierecom Internet banking solution and last year collaborated with the vendor to implement a merchant capture solution that allows customers to capture and deposit checks without leaving their place of business.

But Danversbank CIO Lisa Rose Mandel doesn’t dwell on what has been done in the past.



“My focus isn’t as much on what we have done in the last 12 to 18 months; it’s on the next 18 to 24 to 36 months,” she said. “One of the charges I’d like to get excitement around is we have this wonderful architecture underlying our systems going forward and as you get into electronic commerce there are so many opportunities – with commercial customers through cash management and with retail customers through online banking – to integrate different services in a way that really makes it seamless for the customer.”

For Mandel, much of the potential she mentions will involve tapping the promise of service-oriented architecture (SOA).

ITI, Danversbank’s partner for Internet banking, has also embraced SOA.

“We use the .NET Framework in our middle tier and take advantage of the Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) through our presentation tier,” said Jim Sizemore, ITI’s CIO.

Mandel and Sizemore believe that SOA’s time has come in part because customers are starting to think differently about technology, and many are reaching a point where they expect a certain level of technological integration.

“People don’t want to take checks to a bank and deposit them and wait a couple days for that deposit to appear online. They want to be able to click and drag transactions from one account to another. To be able to do that you need an architecture based on the principles of SOA,” Mandel said.

The speed and flexibility of SOA are what make those types of integrations feasible, explained Sizemore.

“There’s a time-to-market differentiation. With traditional forms of integration in the past there was a longer time-to-market to accomplish and remedy these types of integration challenges. In today’s environment firms can’t always afford to take six months to study the integration strategy,” he said.

By way of example, Mandel explained that she received a mandate for remote capture last year with a less-than-three-month turnaround.

“I got an edict in January that we needed remote capture and we needed it by March. Fortunately ITI was working on something in that area, and because of the nature of the architecture it was very plug-and-play,” she said.

Mandel expects the online channel will continue to grow in importance in terms of how banks interact with customers, and the Internet channel’s rising importance will propel SOA forward.

“The main focus moving forward will be the electronic communication channel with customers on both a retail and commercial basis. Particularly with the advent of remote capture, the mid-sized company, the large company and the small company will not want to take time out to go to the branch,” she said. “We will need freedom to be able to respond to customers’ needs and when customers want to work with three vendors they are not going to want to have to touch three points to do business.”

ITI released the first generation of its SOA-based Internet banking system three years ago. Since then all its clients have moved to it and it has been adopted as the company’s defector standard for development.

“In 2006 we had 51 new releases of software including 30 new products,” Sizemore said. “It has improved our time-to-market probably on a magnitude of 20 to 30 percent. The more componentized the services that we build become, the more reusable, and the quicker to market.”

Sizemore said in evaluating the company’s code the IT team found 750 different pieces of programs and 650 different ways to integrate things. By making the migration to SOA the company is re-examining all those pieces and reducing those numbers.

www.danversbank.com

www.itiwnet.com

By Renee Wijnen Caruthers