Book Image

Instant Oracle BPM for Financial Services How-to

By : B.M Madhusudhan Rao
Book Image

Instant Oracle BPM for Financial Services How-to

By: B.M Madhusudhan Rao

Overview of this book

Oracle Business Process Management helps in process automation and improvement with a very high level of flexibility for all the process participants from the process planning team to the end users. It also makes it possible to have corporate employees and customers collaborating towards common goals. Instant Oracle BPM for Financial Services How-to covers many concepts that can be easily reused across industries such as core banking, healthcare, travel, self service automation, e-governance, and so on. It highlights various roles of Business Process Management such as Business Process Modeling, Process Developer, Process Owner, and Process Participant along with the way they work together in a financial services environment. Instant Oracle BPM for Financial Services How-to is your guide to implementing Oracle Business Process Management whilst working in the Financial Services industry.Starting through the discovering of implementation and Business challenges for financial services we will move on to Modeling, Implementation, Process ork-flow’s, deployment and testing. Moving on to cover advanced topics such as Process administering, changing business processes using process analysts, business reporting, participants and notifications and finally collaboration. You will learn to setup, maintain and alter your Business Process Management aimed specifically for the Financial services industry.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Integrating with business partners (Advanced)


Loren Kelleher Bank is a fictitious bank that helps other commercial banks and financial services by providing loans at a lower rate of interest. James Bank has partnered with Loren Kelleher Bank to get loans at a lower rate of interest, and the same funds are disbursed to loan applicants at a higher rate of interest. The difference between the buying rate of interest and the lending rate of interest is what forms a major chunk of James Bank's profit margin. So, it has tied up with many such banks and financial institutions to find out who quotes the lowest rate of interest. Loren Kelleher Bank has a partner service made available on Oracle Service Bus (OSB) that allows banks such as James Bank and other financial institutions to reach them for a rate of interest quote. It also makes business sense for small- and medium-sized banks such as James Bank to borrow loans at a lower rate of interest, and give the same loan at a higher rate of interest to their customers.

Getting ready

Before we begin, the following requirement needs to be fulfilled:

  • Download the source code from the previous recipe.

  • It's also assumed that OSB is already installed and available. If you do not have OSB available, you can leave this activity as draft.

How to do it…

Let's create an OSB layer service that allows partner banks to send a quote on the rate of interest based on the received loan request.

  1. Lets create a simple Partner Business Process, LorenRateofInterestQuoteProcess, that accepts loan request input from James Bank's LoanApplicationProcess and returns quotes for fixed and variable rates of interest. It also waits for some time before completing the process. This can be considered as a waiting period for the Quote Officer to complete his/her task of sending the quote back.

  2. Deploy the process.

  3. Log in to Enterprise Manager (http://localhost:7001/em) and download the WSDL as LorenRateofInterestQuoteProcess.service.xml from the process WSDL URL.

  4. To create OSB resources, log in to OSB at http://localhost:7001/sbconsole.

  5. Create a new project.

  6. Under Change Center click on the Create button.

  7. Create a resource of type WSDL and upload the LorenRateofInterestQuoteProcess.service.xml WSDL file.

  8. Similarly, create one more resource of type XML Schema and upload the jamesbankloanapplication.xsd file.

    Note

    The XSD file is available in the source code folder.

  9. Create a business service as PartnerQuoteBusinessService. This will make an HTTP request to our Partner Business Process that we had deployed. It also makes it easier for the Partner to modify the endpoint URL in case the process gets redeployed into some other machine or into some other WSDL URL.

  10. Create a proxy service as PartnerQuoteProxyService that maps to PartnerQuoteBusinessService. This proxy service uses the SB protocol to communicate with a business service.

  11. To test the proxy service, click on the Launch Test Console icon under the Actions column to launch the test console for the proxy service.

  12. Provide the required XML input as the request message.

  13. Log in to BPM Composer, enter the quote, and we will be able to see the response message in SOAP format.

  14. In JDeveloper, open the composite.xml file of LoanApplicationProcess in the Design view.

  15. Insert a Direct Binding service from the Component Palette, as this invokes our OSB layer proxy service.

  16. Edit LoanApplicationProcess and call the partner service before the finance approval stage. Also pass the required payload parameters.

  17. Save and redeploy LoanApplicationProcess to involve the partner. Optionally, we can also call the notification service to e-mail or SMS the partner before sending in the task.

How it works…

Let's understand the output by considering our use case scenario:

  1. Applicant James Cooper logs in to the James Bank Portal and submits his loan application online.

  2. After a series of approvals—that is after document check, agency verification check, KYC check, and before finance approval—Partner Quote Officer Irving Stone gets this application request to quote a rate of interest that Loren Kelleher Bank can offer.

  3. Loren Kelleher Bank offers a rate of interest that is less than the rate of interest quoted by James Bank to the loan applicant. Irving Stone quotes 6 percent for fixed and 8 percent for variable rate of interest to James Bank.

The output of this recipe is an integration scenario that showcases how the process integrates with the business partner's processes that are exposed over the OSB layer.

In reality, partners might take longer than expected to respond. In such a situation, it is always advisable to have a timeout default sequence (or a timer catch event) that waits for a specific period of time and then takes an alternative path. Once the timeout has occurred, it can send a reminder to the partner, or go ahead with the process without a partner quote, or ask for a quote from another partner.

There's more…

In many financial scenarios, partners can also communicate with each other using business-to-business (B2B) transactions over XML gateways. They can also exchange documents in prespecified formats.