MuleSoft in Financial Services
Financial firms often have the most demanding IT needs, particularly when it comes to performance, reliability, scalability, security, and data integrity. Securities firms might be looking to aggregate and deliver real-time streams of market data, to integrate securities reference data, or to complete complex straight-through-processing (STP) transactions in sub-millisecond timeframes. Retail banks, on the other hand, might be looking for ways to increase adoption of their payments services, or they may need a 360-degree view of their customers in order to maximize product penetration and “share of wallet.” Investment banks may have different needs still, for example streamlining their client on-boarding processes or modernizing legacy infrastructure. In all of these segments and use cases, however, the one constant is the mission-critical nature of these applications, given that their customers’ money is always on the line.
Large financial firms’ IT infrastructure often represent years of investment in technology - nothing is ever thrown away. In addition, over the years, mergers and acquisitions can result in extreme heterogeneity, resulting in an acute need for a unifying infrastructure to help integrate all of the company’s disparate technology assets. For an organization in this situation, the middleware infrastructure needs to be flexible and adaptive - able to work with existing infrastructure in place, and without the need for a “clean-sheet” architectural approach that is dictated by some vendors. At the same time, the application needs are often at such a large scale that the infrastructure needs to be both lightweight and robust, minimizing the overhead of hardware and networking while still being able to handle the performance and scalability requirements of the applications.
Mule ESB has its roots in financial services - the project’s founder Ross Mason comes from a financial services background, including institutions such as Credit Suisse, UBS, Rabobank, and NatWest Bank. Mule’s lightweight footprint and flexible, adaptive architecture is ideal for the needs of large financial institutions. Its performance and scalability have been proven in some of the most mission-critical and large-scale financial industry deployments, with 5 of the world’s top 10 banks using Mule.
Select Case Studies
- US tax preparer H&R Block uses Mule in over 13,000 office locations as the core communication component of its Virtual Tax Services project, which helps them quickly deliver the right level of professional tax services to the customer, regardless of location.
- A top-5 global financial services firm uses Mule in its investment banking division. Mule is the middleware infrastructure across 14 business units, integrating and extending an existing IBM-based infrastructure
- A top-3 US bank uses Mule as its back-end integration infrastructure, connecting over 700 different applications
- A leading European-based global financial uses Mule as the infrastructure for its Wealth Management unit, integrating customer and account information with its other systems
