First Citizens Bank
Microsoft Host Integration & BizTalk Server extend financial applications across
the organization
First Citizens Bank is a $14 billion regional bank offering a complete line of financial
services, including personal banking, business banking, investor services, trust
services and insurance services. First Citizens Bank provides financial services
for retail and commercial customers through a network of 340 branches in five states.
In July 2006, First Citizens Bank became the first Microsoft customer to deploy Host
Integration Server 2006 into a production environment as part of the Host Integration
Server- Technology Adoption Program. First Citizens Bank has deployed the Beta 1
release of HIS 2006 while working very closely with the Microsoft Product Team,
TAP Coordinators, and Gold-Certified Microsoft partner, Innovative Architects.
First Citizens Bank is currently utilizing the Host Integration Server TI (Transaction
Integrator) via the BizTalk Host Application Adapter. First Citizens Bank is also
using the new Transaction Integrator feature of Discriminated Unions on the mainframe.
“Host Integration Server allowed First Citizens to quickly and easily leverage
existing CICS functionality to empower business users to understand and therefore
serve their customers better.”
– Adam Brannon, Innovative Architects
Overview
- County or Region: United States
- Industry: Financial Services
- Customer Profile:
First Citizens Bank provides full-service banking for retail and commercial customers.
The company offers commercial and consumer lending, deposit and cash management
products, cardholder, merchant, wealth management services, and various other products,
as well as services incidental to commercial banking.
- Business Situation:
First Citizens Bank needed to expose the functionality of its mainframe transactions
in order to aggregate data from disparate host systems and to extend the availability
of its mainframe financial applications across the organization.
- Solution:
With the help of Microsoft and Innovative Architects, FCB used Microsoft® Host Integration
Server and BizTalk Server 2006 to create a solution that provides a complete and
cost-effective messaging infrastructure for the bank’s mainframe environment.
This solution enables communication with multiple host resources through industry-standard
.Net Web Services.
- Benefits:
• Increased awareness of system availability
• Additional online service enabled
• Future growth provided by Service-Oriented Architecture
• Increased access to customer information
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Case Study
- Situation
First Citizens Bank (FCB) had a really simple goal: aggregate data from disparate
host systems into a unified response. Once a unified response was achieved, FCB’s
more complex goal was to provide a unified view of customers and other critical
entities across a heterogeneous environment.
- Solution
FCB evaluated several technology partners and various platforms and decided to team
with Microsoft and the Microsoft Server platform, specifically BizTalk and Host
Integration Server (HIS).
Previously engaged by the Microsoft sales team, FCB wanted to work closer with the
product team. They were invited to join the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for
Host Integration Server 2006. This TAP program provided key members of the FCB team
with exclusive training at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. In addition to exclusive
training, FCB received a copy of the community technology preview (CTP) version
of HIS 2006, which the FCB team successfully installed in their environment.
In cooperation with Innovative Architects, a Gold-Certified Microsoft partner, FCB
successfully connected the HIS runtime to their host CICS environment, enabling
efficient management of communication with host resources. Utilizing BizTalk 2006,
FCB is able to query multiple host resources with a single message, receiving a
unified response that aggregates data from multiple host messages.
In the future, FCB plans to leverage host security assets for HIS communication
by utilizing Enterprise Single Sign-On (SSO).
- Benefits
By deploying BizTalk server orchestrations and utilizing BizTalk’s adapter
framework, FCB is able to easily establish best practices and a common framework
for integration and messaging. Additionally FCB is able to leverage enterprise level
monitoring and instrumentation that comes “out of the box” with BizTalk
server.
Increased Access to Customer Information
By using Host Integration Server to integrate with the IBM mainframe applications
and BizTalk Server to orchestrate its transactions, FCB is now able to deliver additional
data about customers to customer facing associates. FCB is benefiting from its new
Microsoft solution by empowering its associates to help customers make the best
decisions and ultimately be a more customer focused organization by viewing the
complete picture of a customer.
Future Growth Provided by Service-Oriented Architecture
FCB was able to use the Transaction Integrator visual tools provided with Host Integration
Server 2006 and Visual Studio .Net 2005 to extend the bank’s OS/390 transactions
as Web services. FCB expects to be able to use the Web services to broaden the availability
of its mainframe financial applications throughout the organization and to speed
development of future solutions.
- Software and Services
• Microsoft Windows Server System
• BizTalk Server
• Host Integration Server
• SQL Server
• Microsoft .Net Framework
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