Synovus Financial Corp. says it has improved customer service and more tightly integrated its back-office business processes with reusable technology building blocks based on service-oriented architecture.
John Woolbright, the chief technology officer of the $33.6 billion-asset Columbus, Ga., banking company, said Synovus has been developing its SOA capabilities for more than a year and is taking an architectural approach to data integration.
"That's where we're going for the next three years, maybe five," he said in an interview last week. "Don't build this monolithic application. Build a lot of building blocks."
The company's goal throughout this decade has been to delegate authority to the 40 community banks that operate under the Synovus umbrella, while standardizing much of the back-end processes.
For instance, Synovus has long done its core account processing on a hosted system run by Metavante Technologies Inc. of Milwaukee, but its Internet banking and other customer-contact applications are from S1 Corp. in Atlanta.
"There's a lot of other vendors we have to integrate with," Mr. Woolbright said. "That's when we evolved into SOA."
Synovus picked data integration software from XAware Inc. in Colorado Springs for its SOA-based enterprise information architecture, he said. "It builds on itself."
Synovus has concentrated its effort on integrating business processes with legacy computer systems, to manage credit bureau reports, customer profiles, account information, core banking and credit card histories, and the like, he said. "We focus on things that are reusable."
As the company has progressively developed a configuration management database, it has been able to accelerate its enlargement to new services by building on existing elements, he said.
For instance, Synovus used SOA to install mobile banking, interfacing its existing systems with the downloadable application from the Firethorn Holdings unit of Qualcomm Inc.
"Point to point is cheaper and easier," he said. "If it's going to be reused, we put it in our SOA network."
Randy Heffner, an analyst at the research company Forrester Research Inc. said companies have been slow to think of SOA as a strategic business asset, like the human resources department, rather than a technology tool.
"That's part of the evolution of industry thought," he said. "How many times does somebody start a new business unit and say, 'I wonder if we should use the corporate HR department?' It's just there."
