Norwegian software vendor Commercial Banking Applications (CBA), today announced that its IBAS GBF - Global Banking Factory is now available to customers on a SaaS model in the cloud. IBAS GBF has already been successfully deployed in the cloud on Amazon Web Services for a customer in the trade finance space, and users are already benefitting from the increased agility, scalability and resilience offered.

In addition, CBA’s IBAS platform supports RESTful APIs, allowing banks to seamlessly interface to other systems and share information in real-time, not only between front and back office systems, but also directly with the banks’ customers on relevant portal platforms. Adopting a cloud-based platform and Open APIs is essential for banks looking to compete effectively and scale their business in a fast-changing landscape. It’s also crucial for those banks that see the benefits of collaborating and partnering with Fintechs and other players to broaden out and open up their service offerings.

“In the Open Banking era, banks need to be ready to compete and also collaborate with nimble Fintech players as part of a fully-connected ecosystem. Quite simply: if a bank is not ready to offer RESTful API services they will fall behind as they won’t be able to adapt and integrate new products and services fast enough,” explained Rolf Hauge, CEO of CBA. “Our IBAS platform already offers a library of RESTful API operations covering the relevant transaction types and business events across the payments and trade finance lifecycles. We’re making it very easy for banks to integrate other third-party solutions as part of their offering and provide a seamless service to clients through corporate portals.”

Having a flexible architecture in place is also essential in helping banks adapt more easily to upcoming changes in standards, such as the migration to ISO 20022 for cross-border payments and Target2. The microservices-based architecture of the IBAS platform employs reusable components to define products and workflows. This means that when an individual component is updated, all instances of the same component can be automatically updated throughout the IBAS system without any need to re-write source code. The result is that changes can be rolled out very quickly, and the testing process can be completely automated. This ensures a rapid time to market and an ability to react ahead of the competition to market changes and opportunities.