Customer Service Drives Integration Many of my recent conversations with people in the banking industry and other financial-services companies have been focused on strategies to take to avoid unintentionally annoying highly valued customers. Examples include allowing high net-worth customers to cash checks after normal hours; not bothering a customer who regularly charges thousands of dollars a month about a late payment that is less than a hundred dollars; and clearing checks faster for large accounts with lots of activity.

A complementary strategy is cross-selling to existing highly valued customers. Examples include persuading auto-loan customers to become home-loan customers, getting Certificate of Deposit holders to buy life insurance and having checking account customers use the bank's credit card. The Holy Grail is powerful customer-relationship management, based on a unified view of all customer relationships across applications.

Of course, this assumes that banks have integrated their applications. Wrong. In most banks, every customer-bank relationship is handled by a separate silo application. This makes it impossible for anyone at the bank to have a comprehensive view of any customer. The solution, of course, is to integrate these islands of automation into a customer-centric approach using middleware.

Integrating With Message Brokers One middleware approach that's getting a great deal of attention in this kind of situation is the message broker (also known as message engine, event broker, event engine, message hub and/or event driven architecture). The basic idea--and it's a good one--is to tie a set of silo applications into a hub-and-spoke configuration with each application at the end of a spoke connected by a thin adapter. The applications both publish and subscribe to the message broker. In a banking scenario, for example, the teller application might send a message that the teller was initiating a check deposit into a savings account with more than $10,000 in it. The broker would then publish this message to a set of applications, including a CD application that would respond with a message that six-month CDs greater than $5,000 offer more than double the interest of the saving account. This, in turn, would cause the teller GUI to display a cross-sell message suggesting that the teller pitch a six-month CD to the customer.

A variety of vendors are positioning themselves as message brokers or as part of a message broker solution. Products from Active Software and Vitria Technology are built from the ground up as complete message-broker systems: adapters, messaging transports and the brokers themselves. New Era of Networks and TSI International Software provide brokers that run on top of IBM's MQSeries. Century Analysis, HubLink and Software Technologies--all vendors from the health-care vertical, where message brokers were referred to as interface engines--are trying to enter other verticals like financial services and telecommunications. Meanwhile, middleware vendors like Information Builders, Open Horizon and TIBCO are repositioning themselves into the message-broker space.