Citibank is one the largest private-label credit card issuers in the world. The bank handles 2 million transactions a day, 16 transactions a second, with a middleware framework whose first iteration took about a month to develop back in 2000, according to Jim Payne, vice president and senior lead architect with Citibanks’ Citicards technology.
    
The piece of middleware, called the Apply & Buy Framework, is not only about volume, but about speed, and flexible workflows that power a system in which users can easily retrieve information within a massive database, from the Web or from retail touchpoints around the country.
    
“If you walk into a store, and you’re asked whether you want to open a credit card account, once you’ve provided the required information, within seconds you can have an approval,” Payne says. “If you don’t have your credit card with you, the system can perform account lookup, find available credit, and even fund upselling suggestions.” Payne described the framework, and the technology behind it, at the fifth annual Microsoft Financial Services Developer’s conference in New York late last month.
    
The middleware framework uses an SQL Server database and MSMQ and SOAP for messaging. It was originally constructed with a Windows DNA 2000 architecture, however Citi has added a number of .NET components within the system. Moving forward, new functions and features are going strictly into .NET and the core component set is being reviewed for conversion to either VB.NET or C# when there is a need to consider tweaking an existing feature, depending on the language the component was written in. The framework has delivered better than five nines uptime.
    
“It’s not uncommon for us to see 100 percent uptime,” Payne says. “End-to-end we have seen uptimes of seven to eight nines,” Payne says.
    
Payne says the system’s instrumentation, provided by Windows Management Instrumentation, (WMIA) in terms of being able to monitor the system has been outstanding.
    
“How do you think I got these metrics?” he quips. “The 16 transactions a second doesn’t count the monitoring messaging going out. I’d say about 5 to 10 percent of the messaging traffic is monitoring,” he says.
    
Payne also notes the “plumbing” has improved tremendously over the years. The company also recently upgraded from 32-bit to 64-bit computing technology, and in Payne’s estimation, “We didn’t have to do any of the work.”
    
Bill Hartnett, Microsoft’s general manager of financial services strategy and solutions, says that this type of ease of use for developers is characteristic of the type of R&D spending that Microsoft has invested in its products.
    
“If you ask people about the move from 16 to 32-bit it was awful. Developers had to rewrite code and it was a headache. Now you plug things in and the system does the work for you. This is typical of Microsoft’s investment,” he says.
    
Harnett adds that the volume handled by Citi’s Apply & Buy Framework points to the scalability and flexibility of Microsoft, particularly considering the fact that it was built with an earlier generation of technology years ago.