Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank is one of the leading international financial service providers. Based on the Private Banking expertise, Deutsche Bank Luxembourg S.A. provides individually tailor-made asset managementrelated products and services.

The Challenge

Deutsche Bank Luxembourg was facing the challenge to manage the rapidly evolving business and technology changes while reducing integration efforts. As such, the bank decided to reorganize its IT architecture, which was mainly based on applications exchanging information between each other either directly or manually, and chose to deploy a middleware-based solution. The bank’s orientation was clearly to use the Mercator middleware to automatically inter-connect applications with one another, improve the overall processing time and, hopefully, reduce the development time of interfaces.

The Solution

With the assistance of Fujitsu Services, a pilot project focusing on the processing of commercial private banking payments was set up to check the adequacy of the Mercator middleware. Together with the Bank, Fujitsu Services performed the analysis of the existing processes and underlying applications and (manual) interfaces. According to the potential of Mercator, the integration architecture between the various automated components was then redesigned, implemented and “field” tested.

Such a solution required also the reengineering of the payment business process (since it became more automated and better integrated) and has confirmed a significant time reduction for interfaces development.

The Benefits

“The benefits of this new solution consist in a more advanced process integration, a reinforced control and an increased automation, which allowed to reduce the number of manual interventions”, concluded Roger Engel, responsible for the application development department of Deutsche Bank Luxembourg and author of the book “Applications Cobol sur le Web” (Cobol Applications on the Web). The re-engineered payment process is operational since January 2001.

The implementation of the middleware allowed simplifying the integration of applications, creating a continuous flow of information (STP – Straight Through Processing) and implementing a new technology independent architecture for messaging systems, platforms and financial networks.

Due to the success of this project, Deutsche Bank Luxembourg has asked Fujitsu Services to further assist them in the automation of another key business process focusing on Loans syndication between their USA and Luxembourg locations.