Whats the most pressing technology need in the banking sector?
Geurden: One core area of investment is enterprise application integration, or EAI. Every bank wants to build a customer-centric, multi-channel middleware infrastructure that gives customers a consistent experience independent of the channel used to reach the bank. That’s a big integration problem as many of the larger banks are consolidations of multiple smaller banks with disparate legacy systems. It requires bringing together multiple product silos and previously acquired businesses into a coherent infrastructure. The introduction of non-traditional offerings — such as insurance and brokerage –into the core banking relationship only accelerates this trend. Several banks are also using EAI tools to automate current processes, such as least-cost routing of payments or integration of cash management solutions into their clients’ ERP systems. Microsoft’s EAI offering is centered on Microsoft BizTalk Server. Customers are using it to build wrappers around legacy systems and then implem
