Infosys Finacle ecorporate

Transcription

1 Ellen Walsh Product Report 24 September 2002 Infosys Finacle ecorporate Summary Finacle ecorporate provides e-banking solutions via the Internet and Mobile channels under J2EE and.net architectures. This allows single point access to products and services for corporate clients. Table of Contents Overview Analysis Pricing Competitors Strengths Limitations Insight List Of Tables Gartner Entire contents 2002 Gartner, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

2 Corporate Headquarters Infosys Technologies Ltd. Banking Business Unit #27, Infosys Towers, Bannerghatta Road Bangalore, India Tel: Fax: Overview Finacle ecorporate, Module of the Finacle suite of solutions, is a component-based, multichannel corporate banking solution which enables banks to offer a consistent, multichannel experience to its customers. Built on open industry standard platforms J2EE and.net it is functionally divided into three layers: Remote Access layer, Application Layer and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) Layer: The Remote Access Layer offers gateways to HTTPS, WAP/SMS, XML and customized gateways for emerging channels and third-party applications. The Application Layer sits below the channel access layer and contains the applications Corporate Banking, Customer Management, Personalization and Content Management, and epayments. The EAI Layer handles all interactions between Finacle ecorporate and various back-office systems. Enterprise Application Integration Connectors and standard industry middleware contain gateways to enterprise applications, such as CRM, Data Warehouse, Finacle core banking, Treasury, Corporate and Retail back-office systems. Accounts View customer number, account type balances for operative, loan and deposit accounts. View available balances, book balance, etc. Quick view for bank-level (configurable) number of transactions. Query transactions: search based on Multiple parameters. Online transaction display. Sort transactions. Transaction receipt download and printing or statement download/printing into Personal Financial Managers, spreadsheet, text. Status for issued or deposited checks. Stop check. Details of operative or term deposit account. Temporary Overdraft details. Loan account details, such as expiration date, principal demand installments in arrears, principal demand arrears, interest demand installments. View disbursement schedule for loans. 24 September

3 Loan and Deposit Schedules Funds Transfer Documentary Credit (DC) Bank Guarantee/Standby Letter of Credit Customized forms for various requests, such as account opening, checkbook request, etc. Alerts such as account balance below minimums. Principal and interest flows attached to loan or deposit accounts. Displayed details include sanction date, sanctioned amount, disbursed amount and current liability. View repayment schedule, deposit maturity amount and tax details. Transfer between own accounts and other accounts within the same bank. Transfers to accounts with other banks. Interface to payment gateway system can be developed as customer component. Remittance transfer to banks outside of home country. Multicurrency transfers. Instant transfers or schedule transfers (onetime and recurring) for future date. View or stop pending transfers. Transfer can be configured or additional authentication of transactions using transaction password. Snapshot of all outstanding documentary credits. Search on DC reference number, expiration date range, beneficiary, type, currency and others. View general and tenor details, amendment details with S.W.I.F.T. tag display. View related bill details, transfers, transactions on operative accounts associated with documentary credit. Online document credit opening and amendment; interfaces to back end via custom development. Status inquiry of online documentary credit opening request or amendment request; interfacing with Trade Finance customer development. Support for customer-side template maintenance for documentary credit opening and also for maintaining standard clauses used by customer. Support for documentary credit alerts, such as expiration dates in n number of days. Support for both Inward and Outward Bank Guarantees. View general and tenor details of bank guarantee as well as snapshot of all outstanding bank guarantees. View full text of a Bank Guarantee. Search by reference number, expiration date, beneficiary, currency, amount range and status. View transactions on the operative accounts associated with a letter of credit. View associated forex contract details. Online Opening and amendment supported; interface to back ends custom development. Support for various alerts, such as Bank Guarantee invoked or due in n number of days. 24 September

4 Trade Bills/Collections Forward Contracts (FC) Electronic Invoice Payment and Presentment B2B Payments Lines of Credit Multilingual Support Security Workflow Support for inward and outward bills. Search on bill reference number, lodge date, due date. View snapshots, general and tenor details of bill. View event details associated with Bill (lodging, amendment, realization, closure, etc.). View full text of Bills and amendment details. Online bill lodging and status inquiry of bill lodging. Support for various alerts, such as bills falling due for payment in next number of days. View general and tenor details, snapshot of all forward contracts. Search on FC reference number, type, validity, date range and status. View event details associated with Forward Contracts (lodging, amendment, realization, closure, etc.). Online forward contract booking and inquiry status. Support for various forward contract-related alerts. Allows the bank to present corporate customers invoices to third parties for payment. Supports multiple bank-definable invoice formats. Banks can utilize the escrow account mechanism to enable customers of the bank to track the status of multiple deals and enable payments and receipts through various mechanisms, such as Direct Debit and Credit. Snapshots of lines of credit granted, utilized and percentage utilization. Drill down to individual loan/trade instruments utilized under a line of credit. Consolidated Corporate View or Branch-office view. Summation of all lines of credit details for all locations. Supports generation of cyber receipts. Bank can maintain customer data in as many languages as desired. Display in customer-preferred language. Validate corporate users via Corporate ID, user ID and password. Supports log-on password and transaction password. Addresses nonrepudiation via user ID and password authentication, client certificate, token-based authentication (secure ID). SSL, 128-bit encryption, client authentication using smart cards or token-based cards. Various hierarchy levels with different privileges. Facilitates access control for corporate user down to account level. Multilevel workflow rules to decide on flow of approval. Separate workflow limits for activity types bulk uploads can have separate limits from own account transfers. Users can choose next approver, and course of approval can be changed for unapproved transactions. Alerts of transactions awaiting approvals. History of approvals. 24 September

5 Nonfinancial transactions (check-book request can go through minimum two-level approvals). Administrators and higher-privileged users can inquire on activities of other users. Bank can limit exposure for corporate, for individual financial transactions or for a group of financial transactions. Limits can be set for day, week, month or year. Limits can be set for corporate, user or account level. For every successful transaction, limits will be applied, and for every failed transaction, limits will be reversed. Facility for corporate users to find out limits utilized. Administration Bank can create corporate IDs and attach the same to customer information file (CIF) IDs or customer IDs of multiple hosts for a single-window view. Bank can provide certain users global access to all group company accounts within the bank. Bank can provide functionality based on customer segmentation to differentiate user access, restrict access of differentiate functionality from one division to another. Bank can maintain external account mandates for debit and credit limits on accounts of other customers within the bank for corporate customers. User preferences for , links, date/time format. Set minimum balances, account nicknames and user access for accounts and facilities. Generate/regenerate sign-on and transaction passwords. Set up users, application parameters, corporate users, relationship officers, password maintenance, requests, activity inquiry by administrator, audit reports. Internal Finacle ecorporate supports the following basic mail functionality: Inbox, compose, message, log trash, move mail to folders; Relationship Manager can send mail with attachments, search mails based on sender and date range, and broadcast bank messages to user groups. File Upload Users can upload files such as salary files. Flexible corporate-specific file formats can be supported. Interface to Back- Finacle ecorporate supports an interface layer to connect to back-end hosts. End Systems Integrated with Finacle Core Banking, Equation 3 (Midas Kapiti), Trade Innovation and TC3 back ends. Custom development of host interfaces through a message-based communication through middleware or API calls on the application. Personalization and Common Content and Personalization module across all delivery channels, allows Content rules to be customized for each channel. Management Used to personalize customer interactions, based on bank-definable parameters, like click-through patterns, demographic profiles and behavioral patterns of the customer. Architecture Windows 2000, Solaris 2.8 Database Support SQL 2000, Oracle 8I Web Servers iplanet 4.1, IIS 5.0 Application Servers Websphere 4.0 and iplanet 6.5 Browser IE 5.5 or above, or Netscape 4.7 Secure ID Server Ace Server September

6 Reports Crystal Reports Enterprise 8.5 SMTP Server SMTP 2.0-compliant server WAP Server Nokia WAP 1.1; Nokia 1.1 Analysis Architecture Finacle ecorporate has been architected on the open industry standard platforms of J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and.net and uses standards-based interface protocols, like HTTPs and XML. Infosys provides a multichannel framework architecture to obtain a unified view of customer interactions across all delivery channels. Finacle ecorporate currently allows views across Internet, touchscreen kiosks and mobile devices. The architecture consists of the following layers: Delivery Layer end-user touchpoints, such as Internet, ATMs, Wireless, Call Center. Tools such as personalization and content management across multiple channels. Functional modules, including Retail (asset products, such as loan and liability products, such as savings accounts, current accounts, checking accounts and deposits), EBPP and shopping mall. Infrastructure Services for funds transfer, management, financial modeling, requests, administration and security. Interface Layer for links to back-end systems via middleware or customer-built APIs to communicate with host and third-party applications. The Finacle ecorporate solution is based on J2EE and.net standards and consists of three main layers: Tier I handles protocol transcoders for various industry protocols, like HTTP(s), XML, WML, SMS. This is being extended to cover other channels. Tier II is the business objects and Rules Layer, which is further divided into the following layers: Presentation, Command, Business Objects, Data and Interface Layer. Tier III is the Back-end Interface layer to various Host Applications. Tier II Model View Control (MVC) Framework describes the Tier II architecture. Model is the component that contributes to business functionality. View Controls the presentation logic, Control ensures that the right business components are called. Solution Under the J2EE Framework Presentation Layer View is controlled by Java Script Pages (JSPs). The JSPs contain the logic that is necessary to construct and control the presentation and user interface of the application. All requests from the browser are submitted to the servlet, which resides in the Servlet Engine part of the infrastructure layer. Command Processing 24 September

7 This layer corresponds to the Control aspect of the MVC and provides a standard way to invoke the business logic request. Command processing is initiated by the servlet by invoking a command object and passing the necessary repository object. Business Objects Layer This layer corresponds to the Model layer of the MVC framework and consists of Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs). These beans contain the business logic for the applications. Stateless session beans are used, and all EJBs can be accessed only through a proxy provided by the EJB container. The bank can also develop new business rules by developing new EJBs with specific business logic and deploying them. Data Layer The Data layer consists of two elements: Data Access Objects (DAO), a class that contains life-cycle methods of a business entity, and Value Objects, a serialized class, which contains all the properties of a business entity. Tier III Layer The interface layer has an XML/ISO8583-based interface with the back-end systems. Finacle ecorporate sends a request as an XML/ISO 8583 message. Infrastructure Layer The infrastructure layer consists of an underlying J2EE-compliant application server. Solution Architecture Under.NET Presentation Layer This consists of Active Server Page Extensions (ASPX), which contain the logic that is necessary to construct and control the presentation user interface of the application. All requests from delivery channels are submitted to the HTTP Handler, which resides on the IIS Engine in the infrastructure layer. Command Processing Layer This layer corresponds to Control of the MVC framework and is initiated by the HTTP Handler by invoking a command object from the corresponding assembly and passing the necessary repository object. Business Layer This corresponds to the Model layer of the MVC framework and consists of the.net Remote Objects. These objects contain the business logic for the application. All the objects can be accessed through.net remote. Data Layer and Tier III Layer These layers are similar to J2EE infrastructure. Infrastructure Layer The infrastructure layer consists of the underlying.net framework. The current version of Finacle ecorporate is available on the Windows Advanced Server. Some of the key features of the.ne T framework utilized in Finacle ecorporate application are: Session Management. 24 September

8 Database Connection Management..NET Remote. Pricing Infosys does not release specific pricing for its products. GSA Pricing No. Competitors Cambista Corporate Cambista Technologies was founded in January 2002 to support the acquisition of Brokat s European Middle East Africa (EMEA) e-finance business. The acquisition included the majority of Brokat s interests outside Germany and Central Europe, including the Middle East and banks outside of Europe. The company is headquartered in London, with regional offices in the Middle East (Dubai) and the Nordic Region (Stockholm). While Cambista s team has specialized knowledge of the Brokat Twister product (now marketed as Encorus Enterprise Server), the company is delivering an entirely different range of new applications from retail banking to high-end corporate cash management. Cambista s corporate banking solution provides functionality for payments, information reporting, sweeping and pooling. The underlying platform, Cambista Financial Framework, runs on any J2EE application server and enables functions such as sign-on, entitlements, limits, approvals, event management, scheduling, billing and workflow. COR Internet Banking Solutions (IBS) COR Internet Banking solution is designed to enable banks to offer corporate banking products over the Internet and other channels, including digital television and Wireless Application Protocol devices. The product is based on thej2ee framework and is being marketed mostly in Europe. The product is aimed at the mid-market tier of financial institutions and includes small business banking functionality as well as retail functionality. Temenos GLOBUS GLOBUS is a core processing solution with 24 7 real-time processing that encompasses both retail and corporate banking functionality in a multichannel architecture. GLOBUS has been integrated with a variety of legacy, back-end and enterprise applications. Temenos has a strong market presence in Europe, the Middle East and Asia/Pacific, and has recently expanded into the U.S. Misys Equation The complete Equation suite provides an integrated banking system that includes retail banking, branch automation, corporate banking and treasury operations functionality. Equation runs under the IBM iseries server platform and OS/400 DB2 environment and interfaces with front- and back-office systems. This suite is attractive to those banks that need both retail and corporate banking functionality and want to deal with a single vendor. At the center of Equation is the Core Management System (CMS). This application provides several applications that the rest of Equation uses to perform standard functions. A key component of the CMS is a centralized customer database. This database enables all Equation applications to use the same customer, account and deal information. Because the same database is used for corporate, retail and treasury applications, financial institutions that invest in an end-to-end Misys 24 September

9 solution may be able to reduce database standardization issues and improve cost efficiencies. Corporate banking functionality includes commercial lending and payment origination and routing. Foreign exchange, money markets, marketable securities and forward rate agreements are processed by the Treasury module. i-flex FLEXCUBE i-flex s FLEXCUBE provides 24 7 real-time transaction processing on an integrated platform with multiple delivery channels. FLEXCUBE has a product processor that interfaces with established legacy processing systems and component models of application services on a database server. FLECUBE functionality includes not only retail and corporate banking, but also investment banking and asset management. S1 S1 is in the process of converting its Corporate Banking application to run under the S1 Enterprise Platform. When all of its applications have been converted to run under the Enterprise Platform, S1 will have a choice of over 35 applications, including Corporate, Retail, Small Business, Treasury, Investment and Insurance. The S1 Enterprise Platform is built on open standards, such as J2EE, XML, SOAP, WSDL and Web Services. All S1 applications share common business objects, including Prospect, Customer Account and Company. These common business objects are part of the core data model within the platform itself. CRM tools can access all of the information regardless of the application or the channel. Strengths Suite of Other Corporate Banking Applications In June of 2002, Infosys acquired Trade IQ, the product division of the U.S.-based IQ Financial Systems, Inc. The acquisition brings to the Infosys Banking Group s customer list installations in Switzerland, U.K., U.S. and Japan, and offices with employees in London and Tokyo. The suite of products, renamed Finacle Treasury, includes Trade IQ, an Integrated Treasury System, Limits IQ, Limits Management system and Desktop Risk IQ. Trade IQ is an integrated front-, middle- and back-office system that provides full straight-through processing (STP) and covers money market, foreign exchange, fixed income and derivatives. Although the product is not yet fully integrated with Finacle ecorporate, Infosys has plans to provide close integration between the Finacle ecorporate and Treasury products. Single Platform for Retail and Corporate Applications Infosys utilizes the same underlying infrastructure for both Corporate and Retail applications. This makes adding new applications easier and means that the financial institution only needs to maintain one single underlying platform rather than multiple systems. Rewrote Application for J2EE and.net Unlike some of its competitors that rewrote their platforms to be J2EE compliant by utilizing Java wrappers, Infosys rearchitected its solution from the ground up. Infosys has adhered very closely to the J2EE specification, making changes and support easier. Relationship With Infosys Services Infosys is one of the largest Information Technology Services providers in the world. Although it belongs to separate organizations, The Finacle ecorporate product team can draw on the expertise of the Infosys services team for functionality that may not be provided as part of the standard offerings. Infosys has experience with Blue chip clients, such as Citibank and Bank of America, providing outsourced services. 24 September

10 Cost Competitive Infosys echannel product is based out of India, where labor costs are significantly less expensive than other parts of the world. This gives Infosys a pricing advantage over some of its competitors. Financial Position Infosys ended the fiscal year in March of 2002 with cash and cash equivalents over US$210 million. Infosys reported over US$545 million in revenue for the year. The Business Banking Unit was responsible for US$21.6 million in revenue last year. Java to.net Integration Strategy Infosys has developed an architecture that supports both.net and J2EE. Although other vendors support parts of.net, Infosys is more advanced in its support of the.net architecture. Infosys has developed a plan for companies that might want to support J2EE until.net becomes more mature and more widely deployed. When they are ready, Infosys provides the capability to migrate form J2EE to.net architecture. Limitations No Small Business Offering Unlike some of its competitors, Infosys has not yet developed a small-business banking product. Lack of Standard Interfaces to Back-End Systems Infosys has an extremely flexible and strong technology infrastructure; however, it needs to develop more interfaces to back-end systems. The services arm of Infosys has experience in developing interfaces, although it must be done on a professional services basis, rather than taking advantage of predeveloped application interfaces. Partnerships Infosys has not yet developed a strong set of partners for specific functionality that is missing from its products. For example, Infosys does not have partnerships with imaging vendors or with partners for adding country-specific functionality, such as National Automated Clearinghouse Association (NACHA) and Automated Clearing House (ACH) support for the U.S. market. Weak Presence of Finacle ecorporate Outside of India and Asia/Pacific Markets Infosys currently has little penetration for the Finacle ecorporate Banking product outside of Asia/Pacific, Africa and India. The acquisition of the IQ products, however, expands Infosys reach into the European and U.S. markets. This should help Infosys to gain more of a presence in other markets. Insight Finacle ecorporate Banking is appropriate for financial institutions that want a single platform for both corporate and retail banking. The standardj2ee middleware, with.net options, makes it an attractive option for financial institutions that are migrating to either one of these two platforms. 24 September