The financial services industry is undergoing a significant transformation in how applications are designed and delivered. A key driving force behind this shift is the growing imperative to be global both in terms of providing customer-facing services and in taking advantage of a distributed global workforce. Applications that were previously targeted to local deployments on well-provisioned workstations or kiosks, need to be re-designed to serve an increasingly distributed global client base running “thinner clients” such as consumer PCs, laptops, notebooks, and mobile phones.
Not that many years ago, legacy financial services applications were designed to manage both the presentation layer (the UI) and the business logic using the computing resources and horsepower of the local workstation. The result was rich desktop functionality, but severely constrained portability or reach.
In order to provide rich-client applications beyond the walls of the home office (i.e. an early form of going global), financial service institutions had to rely on remote terminal technologies like Citrix (before they were talking desktop virtualization) or Microsoft Terminal Services.
While remote client technologies (or their descendants) survive in some form, the cost, licensing fees, and technical knowledge required for operation, limit their value or applicability. The business demand to be global is however, more compelling and wider reaching than ever, This is forcing legacy fat-client and remote terminal technologies to give way to Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).
RIAs take advantage of AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, Java (w/ JavaFX), etc. to provide rich client feel and functionality within the confines of a web browser. At the enterprise level these applications provide the scale, feature, functionality and responsiveness of traditional desktop software, but with the global reach of the web applications. They can be designed to handle very large data sets, scale to service thousands of users, meet fraction-of-a-second performance demands and encapsulate complex business logic.
RIAs make it possible for financial services institutions to achieve the requirement to be global, but not sacrifice the performance, richness, security, or functionality of workstation-bound legacy applications. RIAs are however, only one (albeit critical) part of the wave in the transformation of financial services applications. In addition, computationally intensive business logic is being separated from the RIA presentation layer and deployed into the cloud (e.g. SaaS), reusable application components are enabling rapid adjustment and adaption to changing business demands, and financial services organizations are beginning to take advantage of integration and collaboration services.
Categories: Financial Services