2 reference architecture designs for the financial services industry

Financial services companies need to keep pace with the many changes in our world. They need expertise to modernize their organization to quickly meet constantly shifting customer demands while reducing costs and minimizing risk. Competing digitally means being more adaptive in today's global market. Financial organizations need to modernize systems, automate processes, and streamline application delivery to improve resilience, efficiency, and time to market.

For the past few years, Red Hat's Portfolio Architecture team has been developing reference architectures based on customers' real-world use cases in various industries. We have multiple criteria for developing and vetting an architecture collection before publishing it, which you can read in my intro article about Portfolio Architectures.

We're publishing these architectures for anyone's use on our Red Hat Portfolio Architecture Center and community Portfolio Architecture Examples repository site.

This article describes two architectures in the financial services domain. I'll provide a short overview of each and allow you to explore them in depth on your own.

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In the Red Hat Portfolio Architecture Center, you'll find a table of contents outlining the technologies used in each architecture, several example schematic diagrams with descriptions, and a link to open the diagrams directly into the online tooling in your browser.

Open banking

Open banking provides technical and market advantages: Financial services institutions understand that today's banking customers expect fast, easy-to-use services they can tap into anytime, anywhere. Therefore, they are accelerating adoption of digital technologies to enable a variety of new offerings. (Note: this project is a new architecture and is currently in progress, so I am sharing one of the schematic architecture diagrams. You can monitor this project for updates as it progresses.)

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The use case is a cloud-ready, modular open source approach offering a wide range of technology options. It allows low-effort integration covering all aspects of an open banking implementation.

[ Learn how to Modernize your IT with managed cloud services. ]

Payments

Enabling payments in (near) real-time lets businesses, consumers, governments, and others send and accept funds with fast availability to the recipient and instant confirmation to the sender. Enabling real-time (or at least fast) online payment experiences to customers can give banks a greater opportunity to win, serve, and retain customers. By building solutions that capture real-time payments, banks can also drive higher payment volumes, ideally at lower costs, and engage new customer segments.

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This architecture helps financial institutions enable customers with fast, easy to use, and safe payment services available anytime, anywhere.

[ Learn more by downloading event-driven architecture for a hybrid cloud blueprint. ]

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These are two of the many reference architectures Red Hat's Portfolio Architects have published, and we'll publish more as we complete them. If you are interested in more architecture solutions like these, feel free to explore the Red Hat Portfolio Architecture Center.

This article originally appeared on Eric D. Schabell's blog and is republished with permission.