Business Mashups for Financial Services

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.

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