Business Mashups for Financial Services

Business mashups - mashup applications for and by the business are new applications combining the best of consumer mashups and data mashups with a strong process component.

Business mashups are a key component of integrating business and data services, as mashup technologies provide the ability to develop new integrated services quickly, to combine internal services with external or personalized information, and to make these services tangible to the business user through user interfaces.

The financial services industry has been an early adopter of business-driven initiatives using SOA and mashups. Needless to say, this market has other things on its mind just now. The question we are all asking is, "What's in store for us given the meltdown?" I've been building mashups for a handful of global banks for the past nine months, and I've got some opinions about what we can expect for the next nine months.

Mashups in the financial sector aren't just for the back office. I understand that Financial institutions have to be conservative. When bankers and investment institutions stray from the straight and narrow, somebody will likely be in front of Parliament right before they go to jail. So while I understand their reluctance to adopt mashups on the front-end of their business, I think it is a mistake. I wouldn’t expose the banking systems until we get better mashup security. But financial institutions have a lot of other offerings that aren’t tied directly to their transactional back-end systems.

Financial institutions have to walk a fine line. They are in a constant struggle to balance the need for governance, the heavy load of compliance, and a cutthroat competitive landscape. And the financial sector depends heavily on technology to be competitive. And not necessarily technology within a traditional IT organization.

According to a study, for every rupee spent on ‘real’ IT, most industries also spend 60 paisa on ‘shadow IT.’ That is, IT funded directly by, and implemented within the business. In the financial sector I’d be willing to bet the ratio is much higher. One bank employee I talked to said that embedding IT within the business is a necessary practice just to stay competitive. When one bank innovates, the others have to be right behind. That means tight coupling between the technologists and the business so new and innovative offerings can be out the door fast.

This sounds like a perfect job for mashups.

As a consumer of financial services, I’ve got a number of ideas for how they could use mashups without compromising their core banking systems.

I have accounts with several investment firms, yet when I want to do any investment research, I have to search Yahoo! finance to get the financials and Google for any relevant news. I’d use a mashup that pulled that information together into a single page.

How about a mashup that pulls together many investment strategies? Mashing up books from Amazon and information from some of the leading personal finance strategists. How about a mashup that lets me compare and contrast a company’s performance against some of its nearest competitors? Then mash in some Google Docs to let me save my analysis so I can retrieve it later.

I’m not buying that mashups aren’t a good fit for the financial services industry. Most of the innovation, at least on the consumer side, isn’t in the back-end transactional systems. It’s out front, providing services, information and advice to customers.