Financial Services – SSP

SSP, UK Deploys Fiorano SOA To Seamlessly Integrate Cloud Applications And Core Trading Platforms

"As very active users of Fiorano's latest software, we are delighted to find that we have become masters of reuse of components within our projects. We no longer have to code from scratch which has reduced cost and allowed us to offer more services to our clients. In fact, our services model has expanded and our integration projects have become easier. Our clients of course benefit from this level of integration to our core platforms."

Christopher Ward,
Technical Program Manager, SSP

Customer Profile

SSP is a UK based technology provider, specializing in Insurance & financial services. SSP has a massive customer base including 20 of the top 50 global insurers, 30 of the top 50 UK brokers & 4 of the top 10 UK financial advisers. With almost 50,000 users, over 30 per cent of all UK full-cycle electronically traded business is transacted through SSP solutions, making it one of the most trusted names in the financial services sector today.

Business Problem

SSP is leading technology provider for UKs leading insurance and financial services companies. For insurance and financial sectors, the pre-requisite feature for an SOA implementation is high scalability to support tens of thousands of end-users with minimum additional hardware. Often, the Brokers who needed the benefit of integration did not have the resources to invest in middleware technology in a big way.

SSP had a complex infrastructure with Managed Services and back-end software solutions, highly secure 24x7 data center operations and a mixture of hardware and software architecture. To keep within budget, they needed an SOA Platform with linear system scalability. In addition, component reusability was critical to cut out expensive custom coding and to enable near real-time compliance with constantly changing industry regulations applicable to their customers.

Solution

In order to build a scalable and extensible integration platform, SSP initiated an evaluation process to assess several prime vendors in Application Integration and Middleware space, including IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Fiorano, with an additional option of developing an in-house integration platform. SSP decided to standardize on the Fiorano SOA Platform Architecture for two reasons in particular: (1) Fiorano ESB's ability to rapidly integrate cloud-based applications (including salesforce.com) and data with SSP's internal API layer, ensuring integrity of back end data and its availability in real-time; and (2) Ease of integrating their extensive and complex supply chain involving customers, brokers and insurance companies. In both areas, Fiorano emerged as a clear winner in SSP's evaluation process.

The Fiorano solution has been installed for numerous SSP clients as part of SSPs vertical solutions.

Project 1: Deployment at a large UK Broker to integrate its cloud-based CRM, Salesforce.com

One of SSPs clients was a large Broker, selling Insurance in the form of Home/Motor to clients from a network of high street braches. The client has already deployed SSPs own back-end solution but they also make use of a number of other products as you would expect. One of these is a CRM system hosted for them in the cloud. The saleforce.com solution is used to enter prospect accounts and leads which the broker then manually transfers to the SSPs back-end solution. To save money and time and prevent re-key of information, the client required integration between various components and applications. Fiorano is used to connect via a web call to the salesforce.com solution at a set URL. Security tokens are exchanged and the Fiorano solution extracts records marking as being in transit within Salesforce.com. Once grabbed, the record is then moved to the back office by Fiorano, making a web based call to SSPs own API layer. Once the API is called, the record can be added to the back office. A notification is written back to the CRM solution and log files are created. Fiorano is set to poll salesforce.com many a times during the day, ensuring the transfer of data in almost real-time.

The client now has synchronized the data in all solutions, ensuring tracking of effectiveness of marketing campaigns and metrics such as retention. In fact, the single source allows the management to have visibility of crucial data which has been transformed into intelligence. Also, the client never sees the Fiorano interface, so all they have to worry about is how to run their business.

This approach helps drive down costs as the client no longer has to hire staff to re-key the information and by use of the API from SSP and Fiorano's ETL concepts, the data client record is checked to ensure that all mandatory fields are correct and acceptable. Any record in error can be checked as Fiorano is used to write error log files which are placed on a hosted SSP drive for the client to inspect at their leisure.

Christopher Ward, Technical Program Manager says, "It's a simple solution to drive integration with a cost benefit model. In SSP this way of reusing components also obviates the requirement for us to develop thousands of lines of .NET code which then has to be supported. It also means we can build and ensure similar projects are done the same way."

Project 2: Implementation at a large Insurance company in UK to synchronize their Motor Insurance Database (MID)

A legal requirement in the UK for insurance companies is to update the Motor Insurance Database (MID), regularly and timely. MID contains the insurance policy details of all insured UK vehicles and it was set up by the insurance industry to help reduce the number of uninsured motorists on the road in order to reduce the cost of compensating the victims of accidents involving uninsured vehicles. The MID also helps UK insurance companies to comply with the 4th EU Motor Insurance Directive, which requires the insurance details of all vehicles in each member state can be easily identified by a national information centre. In the UK, this role is being carried out by the MIB.

One of SSPs clients, an Insurance sector giant has deployed SSPs back-office solution, which covers all aspects of business including client record management, policy and policy version, claim maintenance, risk management, document management and financial accounting. The business had a focus on Insurance policies that change frequently such as taxi drivers who often take policies for shorter time durations (often weekly policies), the taxi insurance policy often has multiple drivers placed within them. A policy can clearly cover insurance liability for individuals, which taxi drivers take in case of accidents. The policy management is also used to be able to process large numbers of Mid Term Adjustments (MTA) on the policies, ensuring requisite changes are being made in the records. In effect, the policies have a short term state of flux and are constantly being altered in their short life span.

The Fiorano solution logs into the back end database which holds the records within the integrated solution from SSP every night and updates the file in near real-time. Log and error files are generated to ensure error-free reporting. This is important because errors in the submission of data to MID can result in financial penalties on the client. The file created is then moved using a standard FTP process for the client to check and submit to MID where it is loaded and can be accessed by the Police.

This enabled the client to cut costs while complying with MID-related standards and regulations. In addition, the Fiorano powered SSP solution facilitated compliance with ever changing industry regulations, enabling change management in real-time.

Benefits

Fioranos superior integration technology allowed SSP to integrate its multiple and disparate applications, helping reduce the time and cost involved in transforming crude data into decision-critical information. In addition, Fioranos component reusability features enabled SSP to build incremental projects with minimal additional hardware, imparting greater ROI on subsequent deployments.

"Technically an excellent product, we loved the ability to use features on both, Java & .NET solutions with this, Fiorano gave us the best of both worlds. As this solution is rolled out to more clients we get a benefit of reuse which will save thousands of lines of .NET being created and supported. We run multiple peer servers and ESB so now have a way of scaling this approach out to hundreds of customers. It gives SSP the ability to open up new service and business models", says Christopher Ward, Technical Program Manager, SSP.

Fiorano's architectural differentiation has made it a rapidly deployable and easy to use integration platform. Its flexibility and extensibility has helped SSP generate higher ROI with every new deployment.

About Fiorano Software

Founded in 1995, Silicon Valley based Fiorano is a California Corporation with proven leadership in enterprise middleware and peer-to-peer distributed systems. Fiorano's innovative event-driven SOA platform integrates applications and complex technologies into an enterprise nervous system, increases business process performance, yields higher message throughput and enhances availability through agent-based visual composition that bridges the capability gap between business models and their implementation – the model is the application, ready to run.

Global leaders including ABN AMRO, Boeing, British Telecom, Capgemini Telecom, Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group, McKesson, NASA, POSCO Steel, Qwest Communications, Rabobank, Schlumberger, Lockheed Martin, United States Coast Guard and Vodafone have deployed Fiorano to drive innovation through open, standards-based, event-driven SOA applications built in just days, yielding unprecedented productivity.

Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Fiorano Message Queue (MQ) deliver the industry fastest, lowest latency, highest throughput real-time messaging (asynchronous and synchronous) to power high performance, highly available, and collaborative workflow applications whose application services are distributed throughout the IT landscape. Fiorano's distributed, peer-to-peer agents abstract complexity of developing and deploying services to unlock value in a customer's enterprise architecture framework.
 

To find out more about how Fiorano can help you meet your enterprise integration objectives, visit www.fiorano.com or Email us, we will contact you!