success story

A leading Middle Eastern bank launched the region's first open banking API sandbox

Incorporating Virtusa's new digital approach to integration

Our client is one of the leading financial institutions in the middle-east with branches in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, London, India, Egypt, and a representative office in Iran with expansion plans.

The Transformation Project includes restructuring the current integration layers to a more secured Open API, Microservices, and TIBCO ESB (Backend Legacy Applications). All business functionalities are exposed to consumers via an API gateway and orchestrations in the open-source microservices layer.

This success story discusses how Virtusa delivered a 100% success rate for a leading bank in the middle east for launching the region's first open banking API sandbox.

The Challenge

The client offers various financial products and services to its customers. These products and services are supported by a diverse range of applications spanning across all areas of the financial spectrum, including Retail Banking, Corporate Banking, Wealth Management, Assets Management, Treasury, Mobile Banking, etc. A middleware called Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI) platform, or the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), glues these diverse applications to form a unified view. The ESB is also responsible for all the embedded logic needed for the interaction or integration of systems. 

  • The client's existing ESB integration layer platform was created with TIBCO middleware, and all components were integrated with TIBCO EMS or SOAP / HTTPS Services. 
  • Instead of direct connections, the current architecture indirectly connected applications to the ESB. 
  • The existing platform has limitations in providing support for all diversified applications. 

Hence, the client decided to enable open banking collaboration with the launch of its API (Application Programming Interface).

 

The Solution

Virtusa played a major role in the Project, using API gateway, Microservices, and ESB aligned with a cloud-based PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering and the API economy. Opening up future opportunities to integrate any system is possible in the most secure manner. The new capabilities include:

  • A modified integration layer with a single API gateway entry and microservice layer that handles orchestration and business logic
  • All the services will be exposed via API with JSON/XML as a message format
  • Enhanced ESB features and capabilities with more security and extensibility with API Gateway and microservices
  • Complete digital transformation with global banking functionality over APIs
  • A platform with over 100+ API service domains and up to 2000+ endpoints covering retail and corporate banking
  • Entity agnostic APIs to be used across the client's enterprise group
Open Banking API Sandbox - Solution
The Benefit

The client became the first bank in the region to launch open banking API sandbox with a secured API gateway and a flexible futuristic development approach with other benefits like:

  • Winner of the "Best API-led innovation" for building a comprehensive 'Banking-as-a-Service' platform through the 'Transformation Project' initiative
  • Launched a dedicated API initiative in 2018 to make the cloud an integral part of the enterprise's landscape
  • Build over 250 APIs independently in ten months with plans to build over 600 APIs by the end of 2020
  • Incorporated new ways of digital integration with an integration architecture
Virtusa's open banking solutions suite can help accelerate and streamline your open banking adoption
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