Redefining Banking SaaS—Introducing Oracle Banking Cloud Services

As digitization continues its ascent, the number of ways that companies interact with their customers and clients continues to expand. PwC estimates the global volume of cashless payments is expected to increase by more than 80 percent between 2020 and 2025 and reach nearly 1.9 trillion transactions. And, the increase in banking transactions from traditional e-commerce pales by comparison to the explosion in subscription e-commerce—a market that is expected to increase from $72.91 billion in 2021 to $904.2 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 65.67 percent.

There is ample evidence that modernization is top of mind, but the explosive growth in transactions puts a whole new emphasis on renewing systems to handle the demand. Banks have little tolerance for technology transformation initiatives that take years to yield even incremental improvements in scale and resilience, customer experience, and operational efficiency. And far too often, many initiatives aren’t addressing the root cause, namely, retiring technical debt. Focused on helping banks innovate faster, more cost-effectively, and with less risk, we have announced the availability of Oracle Banking Cloud Services.

This is a new suite of componentized, composable cloud-native applications that are available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) globally. The suite builds on Oracle’s decades-long commitment to the financial services industry, deep portfolio of award-winning financial services applications, and the power of the Oracle Cloud to deliver the most comprehensive offering of cloud-native SaaS solutions. Now banks of all sizes can innovate with speed, security, and scale without compromise.

Oracle Banking Cloud Services are designed to meet the growing demand for cloud-native SaaS solutions that bank IT requires to stay ahead of demand. These native cloud services on OCI, combined with Oracle Banking’s microservice-based architecture, can help banks achieve their modernization goals faster while shedding technical debt—not swapping it.

The services can run standalone, work seamlessly together, and coexist with existing applications to help banks lower costs and risk while increasing innovation. Banks benefit from faster provisioning and availability—which can be achieved in a matter of minutes—and gain automated patching and reduced disaster recovery switchover times that lower IT costs and burden. These benefits come from the banking service architecture being built on OCI’s cloud native services that provide responsive, dynamic and flexible infrastructure.

Oracle Banking Cloud Services deliver an unbeatable combination to the market—deep industry domain expertise, microservices-first and API-rich, and the extreme resiliency, performance, and hyper-automation of the Oracle Cloud.

SaaS remains cloudy

Responding to growing demand for SaaS in recent years, banking technology vendors have created a pattern for their apps on various public clouds. In response to client demand, most vendors have focused on client requests to move Cap-Ex to Op-Ex—by standing up bespoke solutions on managed cloud services using a subscription model. And, until now there haven’t been any good alternatives to adopting banking SaaS solutions in mission-critical environments.

As we start helping clients with these moves, several nuanced but powerful differences between the two SaaS models emerge—customized products on a PaaS-construct that are branded as SaaS versus cloud-native SaaS offerings that deliver constant innovation and new functions, consistent patching and security, compliance maintenance, integration, process automation, analytics, and more. With the benefit of hindsight, these differences are coming into focus for banks that want to address the technical debt that inhibits their flexibility to respond to change and the looming mandates of their roadmaps to modernize and reduce costs simultaneously.

Oracle Financial Services Applications and OCI—Unmatched strength, performance, and resiliency

Oracle’s approach to SaaS addresses the longstanding SaaS challenge by using an industry-agnostic base SaaS architecture that is native to Oracle Cloud and the services it offers. Oracle’s deep domain experience, gained over four decades by running thousands of core banking systems, coupled with our technologies, such as Data Grid, DBaaS, Data Guard, and OCI—enables us to take banking SaaS to the next level.

Our in-house development approach of building Oracle banking applications on our own complete technology stack, which includes Oracle Real Application Clusters and Open Source products, yields an organic portfolio of end-to-end banking services. The synergy from these integrated technologies ensures Oracle Banking Cloud Services’ reliability, stability, and trusted SLAs.

Superior stability with integrated technology architecture

A pre-integrated stack is a collection of products that’s tested and offers an easy way to use them together with a single click or a service call. As with any cloud, OCI needs to make many services available to Oracle Banking Cloud Services applications at runtime. Clearly, one of the criteria is where the services are that the application needs to run—and, better yet, are they pre-integrated with the fabric and take advantage of other dependencies?

The technology chassis that Oracle Banking depends on is an Oracle stack for this precise reason. OCI continues to expand its list of services, and the OCI marketplace is expected to add additional integrated stacks. Both factors ensure that the benefits of Oracle Banking Cloud Services for banks will increase more over time. Some of the Oracle technologies that Oracle Banking Cloud Services depend on would become resources that can be configured with one click as innovation cycles continue to progress—offering fast, timely, and reliable launches of SaaS.

Global scale and reach

As multi-cloud becomes the norm, banks will move away from making cloud choices and will make service choices. For example, a bank might run its channel applications, middleware APIs, and backend core systems out of different clouds. The predictability of Oracle Banking Cloud Services’ availability is predicated on the availability of OCI, which offers banks ready-to-go SaaS capability across most global regions.

Oracle Banking Cloud Services architecture defined

Oracle embraces a platform-first architecture that incorporates a domain-driven microservices fabric; is cloud-native, API-first, massively performant, ecosystem aware; and supports persona-driven intuitive user journeys.

Nine core elements define our approach:

• Highly scalable processing on Oracle Coherence DataGrid Infrastructure—including demand deposit account (DDA) processing that has been tested for extreme performance and recorded over 200 TPS per CPU on commodity hardware. It also integrates with a bank’s existing process flows and technology so you can modernize core banking systems to deliver new offerings to the market without disrupting operations
• Microservices-based architecture that allows banks to compose their solutions by embedding or integrating with Oracle Banking Cloud Services seamlessly
• Industrialized architecture that forms the basis of Oracle’s services across all industries offers our banking clients the reliability and performance of using one of the most battle-tested SaaS architectures available for mission-critical solutions
• Security that incorporates the 3Rs (Rotate, Repave, and Repair), third-party attestations, and pen-testing make Oracle Banking Cloud Services the most trusted suite of banking SaaS
• Availability of Oracle Banking Cloud Services in redundant footprints/regions—all of which leverage OCI's fault tolerant multi-zone architecture—offers clients high availability with transparently committed SLAs
• Resiliency is ensured via cross-regional deployments with the geographic and other performance factors that banks and regulators require
• Cost-effective SaaS by virtue of using the various flexible compute shapes of resources available in OCI and cost models that are unique in the industry
• Optimized usability through a templated Oracle Integration Cloud that helps clients onboard to Oracle Banking Cloud Services using a repeatable architecture that aligns with banks’ target state
• Integrated technology stack from application enablers to database to cloud ensures end-to-end automation and a homogenous platform that delivers superior reliability and stability, as well as trusted SLAs
   

Get started with Oracle Banking Cloud Services

For four decades, Oracle’s banking products have offered unique propositions that have helped clients achieve their technical and business goals. As banks learn that SaaS is more than only a delivery model, they are also realizing the benefits that an industry-standard SaaS model can provide. Banks are increasingly seeking to adopt SaaS-based solutions, and Oracle is ready to help them with options to move to an industrialized SaaS technology architecture.

Get more information on Oracle Banking Cloud Services architecture and explore the solutions here.