International Banker reported how PrivatBank navigates the 21st century banking landscape. Igor Remez, Deputy Head of IT and Pavel Korchagin, Head of Engineering at PrivatBank, the largest commercial bank in Ukraine, authored the piece explaining the digital core and how it helps PrivatBank navigate modern banking.
Banking software designed in the latter half of the 20th century is not a good fit in today’s digital, real-time era – but yet it’s still prevalent. Bank personnel might need a report to be immediately available online, not at the end of the week. A banking customer may need to know the exact amount of funds in each of her accounts at a certain moment, but the bank’s systems may not be able to deliver that information with real-time accuracy.
To address these issues, banks often hire programmers to hardcode new capabilities into their systems, or buy expensive software solutions and again add code to make them cooperate. The amount of code grows exponentially, and so does the complexity and cost of maintenance.
Remez and Korchagin explain that a bank’s best choice for gaining needed flexibility is to install a new digital core at the heart of their systems. In the systems used by most banks today, data is stored in an SQL database. PrivatBank’s approach is to describe the whole company as a set of states and processes, and then start working with explicit states, not data hidden in the database.
The digital core allows for orchestration and simultaneous, parallel processing of computational operations. With a parallel processing digital core, it’s like each account at the bank has its own worker. Whereas traditional systems allow for updates to be calculated once per day, a digital core makes it possible to perform the same updates nearly instantly.
PrivatBank has solved its account processing issues by utilizing a digital core provided by the Corezoid Process Engine. With the platform, account data is stored not in an SQL database but in smart nodes, allowing the bank to use a single data row for all business and regulative calculations, and reducing the necessary size of our data storage by a factor of ten. Every kind of banking account and type of transaction that might occur is now associated with a pre-defined process. Most dramatically, the bank’s “daily summation” task – which used to take up to six hours for the old system to complete – is now processed and finished within just four minutes.
The full article can be found at International Banker.