For HP and Microsoft, the problem of multiple delivery channels provides a business opportunity. Using Microsoft .NET, HP has built an integration layer with business services that it calls OpenBank.NET.

HP OpenBank.NET provides a bridge from customer facing applications to legacy host systems.

“It allows connectivity between the channel applications and the back-office system to represent to both the customer and to the bank employee – whether it is a teller, sales person, or service agent – a single view of the customer and all their interaction and transactions in real time,” said Tim Evans, who manages the project for HP.

Banks are focused on improving customer experience, so they are taking a new look at their branches, their sales and service platform, and their customer information. But unless the systems are integrated to provide a good view of each customer, it is very difficult for them to provide advice that can lead to sale of other products.

Middleware solves part of the problem, but OpenBank adds another abstraction layer on top of that.

For financial institutions, OpenBank takes the plug-and-play concept to a whole new level – applying it to business applications. HP has written interfaces for popular banking applications from Fidelity Information Systems, Corillian, Financial Fusion, Mosaic, and BANQIT.

“In this middle layer we offer a number of functions for authorization, common connecting, and messaging,” Evans said. “We used this as a way to connect to the back-end systems.” Using OpenBank, a financial firm can add new front-end applications quickly, or replace applications without writing new interfaces.

“BANQIT just brought out a new teller platform that is Web-enabled in a .NET Framework, and we integrated it pretty quickly,” said Evans. BANQIT installed the application in one day, and the next day the first functions of the teller platform were interacting with other delivery channels. It took one person just three weeks to get the application entirely integrated.

“Because we are using this service messaging-oriented architecture, we can map any message to any message,” he said.

Banks can protect their substantial investments in legacy systems while gaining new power and flexibility. OpenBank uses Microsoft’s BizTalk Server 2004 as the basis of its HP universal connectivity server to support existing middleware such as TIBCO, and IBM MQSeries.

The intermediate layer also reduces duplication of information by offering applications a way to access services. Instead of having a common business service like account summary or customer profile in each channel, OpenBank can provide them as a service. At last, customer information can be entered once and then made available across all the channels. This will eliminate the common annoyance of long-standing customers that they have to provide their address and social security numbers all over again each time they apply for a new product. Now if a customer changes his address, the information can flow to all his accounts automatically. One bank that visited the OpenBank lab had spent $150 million on an integration project but still couldn’t roll out an address change across different channels, said Evans.

OpenBank is in early stages, said Evans, but it has attracted keen interest from banks in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. He expects that banks would implement it as part of their branch refresh. In addition to connecting channels internally, OpenBank can link to external services and products, so banks can brand and sell mutual funds that are run by third parties. Or, a bank can use OpenBank to combine products or to integrate its own with products from third parties to create highly customized offerings.