Objective
This project addressed the distributed and departmental requirements of the personal banking sector in Europe after harmonisation in 1992. Initial research indicated that banking will continue to change and that the ability to bring new or modified products to market will grow in importance as competition intensifies. The studies carried out by the BANK '92 project indicated that an open distributed system addresses most needs of banks in IT area.
Results will be in the form of a definition of a set of interfaces for the implementation of distributed applications in the personal banking domain, specifically within sales activities, and a demonstration of a suite of banking prototype applications, selected from this domain, that clearly show the benefits of the designed architecture. It is expected that the BANK '92 partners, and other members of the European IT industry, will produce fully productised versions of the blueprint developed by the project. As market exploitation is expected to begin in 1992/93, the project will concentrate on strategic issues and requirements which will remain valid for many years.
BANK '92 is particularly concerned to take into account the requirements, needs and trends of the European banking market and to produce results relevant for this market. To gain valid requirements from the banking sector and to ensure the acceptability of the project findings, the consortium will set up a special bank advisory group (BAG) and take advice from an expert panel.
The project will exploit the results of other ESPRIT projects (ISA, COMANDOS) and use Open Distributed Systems Architecture. This will support interworking within a heterogeneous hardware and operating system environment. The architecture will be non-proprietary and based on multivendor equipment, thereby contributing to increased competition, lower prices and greater choices for banks. It will also guarantee a long-term preservation of the banks' investments in IT. It will be based on object-oriented concepts and will support replication of data. These features will prove valuable to the banks in the necessary restructuring from account-oriented to customer-oriented databases.
The project will then add to this basis architecture services which are specific to actual and evolving banking needs (such as a customer information service). The result will be a Banking Application Architecture (BAC) which will not only simplify the development of new applications on a distributed system but also facilitate their portability to other operating systems supporting BAC. To demonstrate BAC and its benefits, the project will develop a suite of prototype applications in the sales activity business domain.
BAC will put special emphasis on:
- an open distributed architecture based on the use of standards
- distributed run-time and development environment
- run-time services (UAI, data management, banking applications services).
All the partners are interested in banking and share a common view of the importance of providing a basis for the development and integration of banking and distributed applications.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
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94133 FONTENAY-SOUS-BOIX
France