Mike Walker's Blog

Loan Origination Reference Architecture v.2.0 Source

Many have asked for source code to the Loan Origination Reference Architecture and now it's on CodePlex.

Source Code

http://www.codeplex.com/los/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=15173

Home Page

http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/orlos

New Financial Components Released for Insurance and Capital Markets

   

 

Claims Processing Reference Architecture

Claims Processing Reference Architecture provides quality services in the field of Auto Insurance Claims Processing however these components can be leveraged for other forms of claims processing such as: Home, Medical, Mortgage, and other general claims processing services to work on behalf of clients for better advanced services. Today, global insurance industry is facing a challenge to provide cutting edge services and value added customer experience coupled with faster response time and easily adaptable services. Like with the other Financial Services architectures released, this reference architecture leverages the ACORD standard throughout. This insurance interoperability with both Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) and custom built applications in your enterprise.

 

Shown above is the flow and business process demonstrated in the reference architecture. There are multiple personas involved from third parties, agents and internal personal such as various underwriters.

All of this workflow is managed from Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and uses various technologies to implement.

Demo

 

Get the code and the binary installers: Claims Processing Reference Architecture

 

Capital Markets Structured Product Creation

This reference architecture addresses the space of structured product creation.  This is unique and complex process in capital markets. This is due largely to non standardization and isn't often like anything the bank is already trading. This presents a problem in that these types of deals are unlikely to be captured in a core trading system immediately.

Below is an illustration of the process captured from the creation of the product to selling and finally managing that product.

Demo

 

Get the code and the binary installers: Capital Markets Reference Architecture

 

Refreshed Installers Available

1. Broker Commissions Reference Architecture
2. Loan Origination Reference Architecture
3. Online Banking Reference Architecture

 

Get the code and the binary installers: Claims Processing Reference Architecture

 

Capital Markets Structured Product Creation

This reference architecture addresses the space of structured product creation.  This is unique and complex process in capital markets. This is due largely to non standardization and isn't often like anything the bank is already trading. This presents a problem in that these types of deals are unlikely to be captured in a core trading system immediately.

Below is an illustration of the process captured from the creation of the product to selling and finally managing that product.

Demo

 

Get the code and the binary installers: Capital Markets Reference Architecture

 

Refreshed Installers Available

1. Broker Commissions Reference Architecture
2. Loan Origination Reference Architecture
3. Online Banking Reference Architecture

 

Get the code and the binary installers: Claims Processing Reference Architecture

 

Capital Markets Structured Product Creation

This reference architecture addresses the space of structured product creation.  This is unique and complex process in capital markets. This is due largely to non standardization and isn't often like anything the bank is already trading. This presents a problem in that these types of deals are unlikely to be captured in a core trading system immediately.

Below is an illustration of the process captured from the creation of the product to selling and finally managing that product.

Demo

 

Get the code and the binary installers: Capital Markets Reference Architecture

 

Refreshed Installers Available

1. Broker Commissions Reference Architecture
2. Loan Origination Reference Architecture
3. Online Banking Reference Architecture

 

Get the code and the binary installers: Claims Processing Reference Architecture

 

Capital Markets Structured Product Creation

This reference architecture addresses the space of structured product creation.  This is unique and complex process in capital markets. This is due largely to non standardization and isn't often like anything the bank is already trading. This presents a problem in that these types of deals are unlikely to be captured in a core trading system immediately.

Below is an illustration of the process captured from the creation of the product to selling and finally managing that product.

Demo

 

Get the code and the binary installers: Capital Markets Reference Architecture

 

Refreshed Installers Available

1. Broker Commissions Reference Architecture
2. Loan Origination Reference Architecture
3. Online Banking Reference Architecture

Microsoft Lending Reference Architecture V-Lab Released

I am very excited to announce that we have finally released the Virtual Lab for The Microsoft Lending Reference Architecture Version 1. I have heard from you load an clear over the past few months! We now have an Virtual Machine in the "Cloud" ready for you to examine workflows, dive into code or just play with the scenario.

Virtual Lab Start Page

 

Keep an eye out for future releases of the Lending Reference Architecture as we have been heads down on version 2.0 with a ton of huge additions. Version 2 will be released in the same style as with version one which will include whitepapers, source code and source code.

A compile of version 1 Lending Reference Architecture materials include:

Whitepapers

Developing the Lending Reference Architecture

Building Sustainable Banking Architectures

Architecting Regulatory Compliant Architectures

Architecting Enterprise Loan Workflows and Orchestrations

 

Blog Posts

Extending the Lending Reference Architecture: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/04/11/extending-the-or-los-lending-framework.aspx

Windows Mobile Appraiser Solution Scenario: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/04/02/using-windows-mobile-with-or-los.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/03/30/obas-deliver-soa-to-the-people.aspx

The Lending Message Bus Gets Along with all Standards: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/04/10/the-microsoft-lending-message-bus.aspx

Unstructured Data, The Achilles Heel of SOA: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/04/23/unstructured-data-the-achilles-heel-of-soa.aspx

Using the Lending Reference Architecture for Commercial Lending: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/04/11/or-los-and-commercial-lending.aspx

OBA's deliver SOA to the People: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/03/30/obas-deliver-soa-to-the-people.aspx

Choosing a Loan Message Standard for Banking: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/01/17/choosing-a-loan-message-exchange-standard-for-banking.aspx

Web Casts

Lending webcast: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/04/10/2007-office-system-the-next-business-platform.aspx

Document Generation: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/04/11/or-los-and-commercial-lending.aspx

Books

Office Business Applications: Building Composite Applications with Microsoft Technologies

Conferences

These are conferences where we talked about the Lending Reference Architecture

Worldwide OBA Architecture Forum

My Presentation Done Completely in Post-It Notes

Strategic Architecture Forum - Canada

My EA and OBA Sessions at TechEd 2007

 

Partners

We have a lot of great partners that have used either the bits or have used the Microsoft Guidance to influence the future direction of their architectures. One in particular is a gold partner in Australia called Dataract. See my post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/08/20/new-financial-services-oba.aspx

Updated: Bank Teller Composite Architecture

This release adds support for ribbons, form-skinning, various CommandAdapters and UIElements are also added, some of which extend CAB as well as offer basic support for DevExpress controls.

The BankTeller QuickStart application has also been updated to incorporate samples of the new XtraWindowWorkspace and DxMenuItemCommandAdapter.

• Other changes of note:
• The file structure of the release has been reorganized so that things are slightly easier to find and consistent
• The project has been renamed from DevExpress.CompositeUI to CABDevExpress.ExtensionKit (to avoid conflicts with DevExpress' Project Converter tool)
• The base namespace has changed from DevExpress.CompositeUI to CABDevExpress (this will break existing code but is copy/paste job to fix)
  CAB dlls are now included as part of the release to allow for easier download-and-compile
• The code has been cleaned up to some extent, to remove unused includes, unused variables and other anomolies

 

http://www.codeplex.com/CABDevExpress/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=6655

 

Tags: Banking Composite Applications

Microsoft is a member of LIXI

Microsoft is now a member of the Australian Lending standards body called LIXI.

http://www.idm.net.au/story.asp?id=8709

Sydney - Day Two

Today we started bright and early, 7am Australian time. I had the opportunity to meet some the players here in the Aussie market.

We went through Microsoft's position on industry standards, namely ACORD.

Then I went into the international insurance trends that many insurance companies are focusing on today. Many of these trends are a result of regulatory compliance like issues. Once we talked about the challenges in the industry we chatted about what are the Microsoft based solutions to help with these very specific challenges.

I received some great questions during the session such as:

1. How mature is ACORD XML? The ACORD standard has released several versions of their XML schema. Right now the standard is going through a slight flux in their scehmas.
2. What is the ACORD roadmap? ACORD just released version two of their standard and the next release which will be several minor revisions over a period of about five years will take the standard to a unified standards with a common ontology behind the standard.
3. BizTalk Performance and Scalability?
4. Does Microsoft have advice on governance of Service Orientated Architectures. What is the governance strategy for composite applications and their associated workflows? The larger part of this question is governance. Governance is a tricky function. It greatly depends on the organizational culture and maturity. It is difficult for Microsoft to address this prescriptively. However there are best practices industry wide that can be adopted.
5. What's new in BizTalk R2? Here is a link to the roadmap of BizTalk R2 and beyond. http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/roadmap/default.mspx

The Lending Message Bus Gets Along with all Standards

Recently I've been asked about if the Lending Message Bus (LMB) supports other standards other than MISMO. The answer is... of course it does. The LMB can support one or more standards. This is due to the modular design of the adapter and accelerator framework within BizTalk Server.

So let's take a step back, what are accelerators. This doesn't get communicated very well. At the highest level accelerators are based on an adapter, for example the MISMO accelerator is based on the XML adapter. The difference between an adapter and accelerators is that an adapter is much lower on the stack. Adapters deal with XML or File transformations and accelerators are about mapping that data to support message routing or high level business processes.

Since maps are used for accelerators that means that they are coupled with an orchestration. So what you see above are autonomous accelerators that can be added to the lending message bus. Since they are autonomous, adding and removing does not effect the other standards accelerators.

 

The accelerator maps enable you to utilize the adapters to translate and transform messages. Translation is the process of converting a message from one format to another format, such as converting a flat file into an XML file. Transformation is the process of taking information from one message and inserting it in another message.

Note: Maps are tightly coupled with an orchestration. You can not have a map dynamically spin off other orchestrations. This is taken into consideration below.

 

How should you architect support for multiple standards?

You want to make sure that you keep the accelerators very thin. The schema maps should only take care of translation and transformation to become usable by a set of course grained services. So in essence you have two layers of orchestrations.

The first layer handle the movement of the information in the lending message bus. The second layer of orchestrations for the consumption into enterprise business processes. The rational for this is to separate the translation services from the business services.

We want to avoid blending these two layers together for the following reasons:

• Unnecessary duplication of code
• Siloed standards support
• Constraints on multi-channel integration
• Time to deliver standards support is impacted due to the amount of duplicate application logic

 

Are there any available accelerators for the Lending Message Bus?

Yes, Additional standards for Commercial Lending have already been developed by Microsoft Consulting Services built in the Commercial Lending Framework (CLF). This requires an MCS engagement to purchase the accelerator.

There have been some discussions of the creation of both a British and Australian (LIXI) accelerator. Stay tuned for more news on that.

[Update]

Gartner wrote a similar article on their site that aligns with the guidance in the Loan Orgiantion Reference Architecture.

• The Lending Services Hub - Lending Architecture of the Future
• Banks must Rethink their Lending Architectures

 

Technorati Tags: ESB,Message Bus,Lending

My Presentation Done Completely in Post-It Notes

This year the Financial Services Developer Conference has the UX theme. So in spirit of UX, I decided to ditch the canned slides and go with something much simpler...

Post-It Notes!

Below are some screenshots:

 

 

Developer Conference Post It Presentation 04 27 2007

View more presentations from Mike Walker.

I would love to hear feedback from attendees on Thursday! Also if anyone else has any comments on this idea. This wasn't an original idea, I saw this somewhere else but don't remember. So if you know I would like to give credit where credit is due.

[UPDATE: I found out what triggered my thoughts on this presentation. Leisa Reichelt’s first did this on here blog.I took a slightly different approach, but they are very similar.]

I'll will post the deck after my session.

 

Technorati Tags: Architecture,OBA,UX,Composite Applications,SOA

ATM Resources Compile

I've been meaning to write a compile on this for awhile. Moin, a colleague on my team asked me if there are any good resources for ATM architecture and trends. This triggered the post, so thanks Moin!

I worked on a few ATM projects in the past and there is certainly a lot of activity in this space. A year ago I was the architect on improving the ATM channel by providing a more rich integrated experience. We called the project ICE (Integrated Customer Experience).

Working with both my bank at the time and vendors we faced legacy challenges with OS/2, deployment, security, wireless, check truncation at the ATM. We wanted to solve these issues and make the ATM more like a kiosk instead of the typical green-screen terminal we all know today.

So I have broken this post down into a few sections. I hope this is useful to all of you!

ATM Trends

• Banks are exploring richer user experience for their ATM's, moving to a true Automated Teller Machine that doesn't just dispense cash
• Advance ATM's will show up in branches first
• Exploration of Cross and Up-Sell opportunities through this channel
• Expect to see rich content such as video and audio capabilities for:
  • Customer Care Collaboration
  • ATM Help
  • Culture and Language Aid
• Banks are actively planning for the termination of legacy frame relay and ATM services
• Banks are transitioning to IP VPN and Ethernet
• Web Services is another emerging standard for the information payload
• ATM Cash Management is an on most banks minds to properly distribute and invest idle cash
• Wireless ATM's, lease lines are expensive and often times do not warrant the cost for such low data transfer and load
• Check Image and Data Capture at the ATM for more efficient check processing, additional benefits include cost savings due to the fact the customer does all the proofing

ATM Challenges

• ATM Distribution
• Patch Management
• Leasing Models
• Idle Cash

 

MSDN Architecture Center Resources

• Financial Services Architecture Center (Windows XP–based ATM Security Design, Managing Windows XP–based ATM's Using SMS and MOM, Active Directory Design for Windows XP–based ATM's)
• ATM's Reliability in Connected Systems
• ATM Embedded and Operating Systems Site
• Introduction to ATM and TCP/IP Protocols

My Blog Entries

• http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2007/04/09/td-bank-financial-group-rolls-out-atm-s-with-ifx.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2006/08/05/714978.aspx

 

Key Standards

CEN/XFS (formerly, WOSA/XFS)

In 1991 the Banking Solutions Vendor Council (BSVC) was created/initiated by Microsoft. The aim was to provide an architecture that supported banking peripherals from various hardware vendors. The result was an architecture called Windows Open Services Architecture/Extensions for Financial Services (WOSA/XFS). In April 1998 the BSVC handed WOSA/XFS over to the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and published it as a CEN Workshop agreement known as CEN/XFS.

IFX

Provides generic ATM standards that have been documented in implementation guides. TD Bank was the first to implement the standard on their ATM's.

See the IFX case study written by Josh Lee

Building Enterprise OBAs for OR-LOS

Yesterday I just released the latest in a series of whitepapers for the OBA Reference Application Pack (RAP) for Loan Origination Systems.

This article focuses on the developer aspects and provides guidance into how to build Office Business Applications in Financial Services. I highlight detailed design decisions and provide code and XML schema samples.

You can find the whitepaper on the MSDN Financial Services Architecture Center:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb410797.aspx

 

Also please remember to rate the whitepapers.

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