Tech teams at today’s financial institutions are busier than ever. Demand for innovative products and enhanced customer experience has never been greater, with the COVID-19 pandemic driving many organizations to quickly implement new customer-facing technology. That’s why it sounds like a dream come true when a vendor says they can provide an integration solution to ensure their software works within your existing information ecosystem. But is it true? Or have you fallen for The Great Integration Myth?
What’s the Great Integration Myth?
Connected banking requires new applications to seamlessly integrate and share critical data with existing applications and services, some of which are legacy. This means that when you bring new software into the mix, your team will have some decisions to make when it comes to integration.
It’s common for the software vendor to offer an integration solution. Either their product connects to other apps “right out of the box”, or with an integration tier that they’d be happy to provide for you. What could be easier?
Certainly, your vendor knows their software best. Having them take care of its integration may feel easier than using internal resources or bringing another vendor in.
But the reality is that vendor-provided solutions, whether “out of the box” or custom-coded, can contribute to a tangled mess of connections between systems, and invariably inject new methods of managing portions of your integrated enterprise infrastructure.
With enough systems involved, the network of enterprise applications becomes “gridlocked” as the dependencies grow exponentially. This can greatly complicate improvements or replacements to any part. Next thing you know, you’re faced with a big-bang conversion project that has you throwing everything out and starting over from scratch.
And none of it is ever as cheap, fast, or easy as you’d hoped (or been told) it would be.
That’s the Great Integration Myth.
Moving past the Great Integration Myth
If out-of-the-box and other vendor-provided integrations aren’t living up to their promises, what’s a bank to do?
Faced with the fallout from the Great Integration Myth, organizations are looking for more flexible, scalable, and stable integration solutions.
Enter the Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP).
An HIP simplifies the enterprise application architecture by serving as a common distributed point of connection for all applications, whether they reside in the cloud or on-premise. It connects disparate systems through their native interfaces, without customization, which greatly minimizes dependencies on third-party frameworks and proprietary data formats.
With an HIP in place, applications can easily be updated or swapped without affecting any other systems or causing widespread downtime.
A future-proof integration strategy is essential to digital transformation. Doing it right means taking inventory, establishing clear objectives, and implementing holistic solutions that simplify the technical, regulatory, and business complexities of integration.
A hybrid integration platform provides a solid foundation for future evolution. It helps ensure that your ongoing digital transformation efforts can scale and be reliably repeated, allowing the enterprise information infrastructure to evolve and grow with your customers’ expectations.