Experian uses SOA to ensure customer is king

Reacting with agility and speed to customer demands is crucial for credit checking services specialist Experian.

The organisation has, therefore, created a customer event management system (Cems) – a real-time delivery platform for business process management, using a service-oriented architecture approach that will allow it to interact more flexibly with its clients.

John Finch, director of development and delivery at Experian’s information solutions division, says web services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a cornerstone to the strategic development of products. ‘It is a customer-led, market-led programme – not a technology-led initiative,’ he says.

The development is being used for applications, systems and data delivered to customers, which include major financial services companies, including high-street banks and credit card companies.

Experian’s reasons for using web services and SOAs are mirrored by its clients. ‘It will enable our customers to be more agile and quicker to market, and have a faster turnaround on products with lower costs,’ says Finch.

Driving the new development technology forward is having an impact on every aspect of IT, including skills, programming and systems development.

‘We are taking our technology investment and re-engineering customer-related services as a set of web services,’ says Finch. ‘We have smashed large monolithic applications into smaller components. Componentising all our available product sets is a big and ongoing job, and has changed the way we work in terms of IT development and delivery.’

The history of Experian’s growth has been delivering automated processing into large financial institutions to help them handle more applications, products and services, and manage their exposure to risk and credit.

The upshot is that many of Experian’s systems are heavily integrated with its customers, creating a complex legacy environment, with huge amounts of data which, as it grows further, ‘becomes more difficult to maintain’, says Finch.

By adopting an SOA approach, Experian’s products can be delivered as standard components through Experian web services, including Detect (application fraud prevention) and Delphi (credit scoring).

‘By converting our existing technology and introducing a set of web services for a standard way of handling data, it will allow our customers to re-engineer their products quickly,’ says Finch.

Experian’s Cems is based on the .Net platform and is in beta testing at the moment with a major financial customer.

The design tool was developed in partnership with Microsoft and is based on the software giant’s Visio drawing and diagramming application.

‘We have augmented it to expose our web services in a set of templates. On the PC screen, consultants can use Visio’s drag-and-drop environment with Experian web services, so we can drag and drop in different pieces of process logic in an iterative way, working with customers and stakeholders,’ explains Finch.

‘We can sit down with customers, assemble processes, press a publish now button and produce executable code. In just a few steps we can build a new application. If they don’t like what they see on the screen, we can re-engineer it,’ he says.

The benefits are that ‘there is no longer a lot of time spent writing application requirements which can be out of date by the time they are finished’, says Finch.

The set of pre-templated processes means that accommodating variations for customers who commonly access similar processes is simple and speedy.

Finch says the big business benefit for Experian in using the Cems tool is a 40 per cent reduction in the time it takes to turn around its testing scripts. ‘We can run a script, test it for errors, make changes rapidly and re-run scripts,' he says.

Experian expects huge advantages from web services, but it took a cautious approach to re-engineering its core assets.

‘We took testing copies of base products from code libraries and started to work on them,’ says Finch.

Having SOA as an architectural design for deploying web services means they are managed and used in a controlled fashion.

‘SOA is the architecture that describes what data is passed where and in what format it can be moved, based on rules and standards which are necessary in the strict regulatory environment Experian works in,’ says Finch.

‘Cems is the living embodiment of an SOA. It exposes elements of that architecture to enable us to build a set of systems on top of it.’

A major challenge has involved developing an SOA to run both on and off Experian’s mainframe system.

‘We have a large mainframe as we are processing millions of rows of data for big customers 24/7,’ says Finch.

‘Our mainframe environment is mission-critical, secure and very controlled. It is easier to process off the mainframe using .Net Microsoft tools, but we have created a set of wrappers around services on the mainframe to expose them.’

Finch says meeting service-level agreements is more challenging in the new service-based environment.

‘It was easier to determine where bottlenecks were with direct mainframe-to-mainframe calls,’ he says.

‘We have assembled the capability of the mainframe to enable XML calls to the mainframe. We have to meet performance expectations. Because the technology scales horizontally, we have found that adding more hardware can increase linear throughput.’

He also says web service technology is allowing the organisation to open up product development on a global scale.

‘In the US, Experian is using Java because a large number of customers demand it, but we are evolving an international, interoperable library of web services,’ says Finch.

‘Subject to control requirements, we can re-use the work done on J2EE. For example, we do a lot of processing around addresses, but they are handled differently in different countries.

‘We could write a service to change the format slightly from a zip code to a post code. By being clever in design and standards, we can re-use assets globally.’

Finch says Experian continues to grow rapidly and that there is a huge demand on it as customers expect an increasingly agile response. But he says web services means the organisation can administer its products more efficiently.

‘Ultimately, it is about customer focus and people, not technology,’ says Finch.

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