Financial services providers today face a dynamic business environment and must create new opportunities, increase efficiency, and enhance customer relationships. Above all, customers demand continuous availability; it is never acceptable for a service to be down, even for scheduled maintenance. Another critical factor is data loss and corruption, since financial data can be of great value. It is very important to prevent any data from being lost or corrupted, even during unplanned outages or hardware problems. Another challenge to the financial industry is fraud and monetary loss.
Banks, credit unions, mortgage banks, savings institutions, and finance organizations turn to the HPE Shadowbase suite of software products for complete data replication solutions. These include solutions for business continuity and minimizing data loss, zero-downtime migration and upgrade solutions to eliminate planned downtime, as well as data integration and application integration for real-time data warehousing, business intelligence, data insight, business insight, and fraud prevention. HPE Shadowbase software helps act as the integration fabric between banking services and fraud detection applications; it forwards transactions in real-time so that fraudulent activity is immediately detected and prevented.
The features offered by Shadowbase solutions are applicable to the sub-components of the financial market sector as follows:
Commercial banks that manage account transactions (for deposits, withdrawals, savings, loans, etc.) in brick and mortar branches, must also offer online access to services. Customers now require that accounts be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, meaning that the IT systems running online banking need to be continuously available. This demand results in the need for Shadowbase software and a sound business continuity plan.
Trading and brokerage services provide the services necessary for the trading of securities instruments (stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc.). These services include not only the stock exchanges themselves, but the many institutions which provide customer management of the holdings, including purchases and sales. As with online banking, these services must be provided online, and available to customers at all times, necessitating continuous availability. Being “always on” is especially true now in the global market, where somewhere an exchange is open.
Payment services essentially provide the means for the transfer of funds between buyers and sellers, including credit/debit card transactions, checks, and ATM withdrawals. The payment system provides a financial message switch between the source of the transaction (e.g., a merchant point-of-sale terminal or ATM) and a bank, where the transaction is authorized and ultimately settled. Payment services must be available all times as an integral part of the “always on” marketplace (24-hour shopping opportunities). If the system is unavailable, it becomes very difficult or impossible for merchants to execute business.