National Bank of Abu Dhabi is making extensive use of Visual Basic to create the middleware needed to bring together the many and varied applications that make up a modern banking system, while still maximising the value of legacy investments.

Situation

The National Bank of Abu Dhabi is the leading bank in the United Arab Emirates in terms of total assets, deposits and branch network. The bank aims to be the UAE’s leading financial institution at the cutting edge of financial innovation in the Gulf, and takes a proactive approach to new services and products, and to using technology to deliver products to customers. At the same time, in a tough competitive climate, the bank’s IT strategy is also focused on controlling costs.

At the heart of the bank’s infrastructure is a legacy mainframe, which handles the core banking functionality. While the mainframe is a highly economical way of running the bank’s day-to-day activities, its limitations mean that adding new services requires that tasks be offloaded from the mainframe. The bank’s organisation, with Head Office acting as a business that serves internal customers in Domestic, Investment and International Banking divisions also means that the infrastructure needs to be adaptable and robust enough to ensure that customers receive the service specified by internal service level agreements (SLAs).

The NCR mainframe, a system that is over ten old, poses a number of challenges for the bank. Processing speeds, accessibility and data storage are all restrictive. “Accessing the mainframe is difficult, and it is not always possible,” explains Charles Wilder, IT Systems and Architecture Manager of National Bank of Abu Dhabi. “On the mainframe, it was taking up to five hours daily to update and maintain only 60 days of deposit accounts financial transactions history. After offloading this process to Microsoft Windows and SQL Server 2000, it now takes just 15 minutes a day to update the history, and we are now maintaining over four years of history online. We could not maintain this much history on the mainframe due to processing time constraints – essentially our end-of-day window would not accommodate it. We needed to provide much more data online for our users and our customers, and we did it using Microsoft technology."

Solution

To keep the NCR mainframe at the heart of the system, while still being able to deploy new applications, NBAD turned to its in-house team of developers. The key to the solution is the use of Microsoft SQL 2000 databases hosted on a single Windows 2000 server that handle the data load of new and existing services. Out-of-the-box solutions are deployed and customized for specific needs and functions, such as Internet banking. Tying the whole system together is a series of middleware Data Gates, developed by NBAD using Microsoft Visual Basic 6. The Data Gates sit in the middle of our delivery channel systems (i.e., Branch Delivery System, ATM Switch System, Internet Banking, Call Centre, Cash Deposit and Payment machines) and the core retail banking system and other back-end systems and provides the interface mechanism and the means of updating the data on the SQL databases in real time. “Our IT strategy over the past 5 years has been to build around the legacy systems rather than replace them,” says Wilder. “The mainframe-based core retail banking system is a very economical system, so it made sense to keep it for a while longer and offload processing as well as new functionality on to standalone Windows 2000 servers. Functions have been offloaded from the mainframe, freeing up processing time, while new applications are being hosted on separate servers with real time updates to and from the mainframe only when data changes occur. Functions such as account statement generation and automated distribution of customers’ transactions data are all offloaded to Windows servers. As another example, we are maintaining a Microsoft SQL database of SWIFT Bank Identification Codes (BIC) information by means of an in-house built .Net application, which is deployed over the Intranet throughout our branch and Head Office network.”

Benefits

The strategy to offload processing from the mainframe brings a wide range of benefits to the bank. End of day processing times are greatly improved – the updating of deposit accounts financial transactions that used to take hours, is now handled by the SQL server in just minutes. The SQL server is also able to hold deposit accounts transactions data back to January 2001, instead of just two months, giving branches and online customers much better access to their banking history. Better access to account history also allows the bank to have a better understanding of the customer needs. “Our databases have grown over the years, and we are now storing huge amounts of data with just one database server handling all of the SQL databases, and the response time is unbelievable – by eliminating jobs from the mainframe, and keeping the data available at a very low cost, it has made a tremendous difference. The beauty of it, we now have an operational data store (including an independent data mart in a key business area) for online access and reporting. We have all these transactions online available on a database that can be used all the time, anytime,” Wilder says. Branches and Head Office departments are now able to access SWIFT BIC information through a centrally-hosted SQL database, rather than each location having to pay a subscription for their own SWIFT BIC information. The bank is also piloting Windows-based ATMs that will enable automatic reconciliation with the mainframe over TCP-IP rather than having to rely on time consuming manual reconciliation.

The strategy also allows the bank to deploy very light, thin client applications to its network of sixty branches across the UAE, making applications maintenance easier and less time consuming resulting in controlling and minimizing the total cost of ownership of hardware and software in the branches and Head office departments. “All of our new applications are .Net and XML based where possible. It is a technology that we are really moving into, because it is a tremendous benefit,” says Wilder. “Above all, development on .Net allows the bank to adapt its infrastructure to new solutions in a fast and cost effective way. Our strategy is to be able to control the development of the interfaces between the delivery channels to the customer and the back-end systems. We are not a development shop, we will partner for everything on the back end, but we want to keep ownership and control of the delivery channels and interfaces. These are the important part of servicing our customers and being able to quickly respond to their needs. It is very economical for us to develop on .Net. There is an easily available pool of skilled Visual Basic developers, and with the low cost of a subscription to MSDN, they have access to a development base for everything we need to do,” Wilder adds.