HCL Technologies is a $1.4 billion global technology consulting and IT services company founded in India in 1991, as a division of HCL Enterprise, a $4 billion organization and one of India’s oldest IT companies. Now one of India’s leading businesses, HCL Technologies employs over 42,000 professionals in 86 offices located in 17 countries in Asia, Europe, and North America. HCL has global partnerships with several Fortune 1000 firms including leading IT and technology firms (see www.hcltech.com and www.hcl.in).
The advantages of outsourcing complex technical tasks such as creating software-led IT solutions, remote infrastructure management services and business process outsourcing is now widespread, and its advantages are well known. HCL has delivered solutions for corporate sectors as diverse as financial services, retail and consumer, life sciences and healthcare, hi-tech and manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, telecom, and media and entertainment.
Drawing on its vast collective experience, one of HCL’s leading interests is using Service Orientation to implement Real-time Payment Platforms. “Many regulatory changes especially in Europe and the US are requiring faster and more real-time payment processing and are inspiring new payment products,” says Drs. Patrick Maes, an HCL principal specialized in investment banking IT.
“Many corporate clients expect more than just fee-based payment execution from their banks, but require an overall payment and cash management service that increases their global liquidity positions and decreases working capital requirements.
However, between this ideal and the reality of achieving it, falls the shadow cast by the different approaches to real-time payments. Maes and HCL hope to remove this shadow using state-of-the art technology to build a universal payments system (see www.gcronweb.com).
The solution Maes and HCL have in mind uses service-oriented architecture (SOA) to replace centralized workflow processing with “intelligent objects” that act upon facts and events common to all payment processes. It implements complex business logic without having to invest in new centralized programs. Thus, it can build new business functionalities, in this case, a single payment system that functions on various existing software architectures banks already have in place. This avoids imposing a specific software architecture because SOA enables the co-existence of multiple software “styles” into this homogeneous single payments solution.
This approach will allow the bank to identify duplication and to define a step-by-step migration to common utilities based upon open standards. “At HCL, we apply a pragmatic approach that will split each payment process or silo into three main elements of functionality: origination, order management and payment execution. By separating these three layers, it is possible to isolate the diverse set of origination channels (e.g. email, fax, EDI, Internet, Phone, Branches, etc.) from the payment execution and processing systems and to concentrate our efforts on the main painpoints, before addressing less burning issues,” says Maes.
A core component of HCL’s architecture is Core Banking System Container. Most banks are the result of numerous mergers and acquisitions, which often results in a number of core banking systems being used. Some of them have real-time capabilities, while others can only accept postings in a batch (overnight) mechanism. These systems often reside on legacy platforms such as Tandem, Unisys, IBM mainframe and they are implemented in a myriad of technologies from Assembler to Cobol. “Most payment engine architectures assume there is only one core banking system for which it provides a specific interface. Therefore our Single Payment Architecture has designed a Core Banking System Container that can identify the exact location of an account, determines the posting and settlement regime and provides a generic interface adapter,” says Maes.
The crucial component in this solution is a “Payment Bus” based on state-of-the-art ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) technology. With it, HCL can de-couple and re-use existing applications and middleware components providing a low-risk transition from current processes and systems environments to the new architecture through a series of steps where each application adds business value.
“What banks want is easily-integrated complex event processing (CEP) that recognizes prompt awareness of many variables such as foreign exchange instability, competitive pricing moves, and denial-of-service attacks.
In payments systems milliseconds, even microseconds, count, especially for financial companies. The emergence of HCL’s single payment system could have a significantly beneficial effect on global business.
Given that the October 2007 Sibos, (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication [SWIFT] International Banking Operations Seminar) Conference in Boston will argue strongly for improving payments systems, HCL’s single payments system solution should be of great interest to everyone who depends on payments or offers a payment service.