Introduction to banking architecture (speaker John Davies)

Since Eric will be going deeper into this in his blog, I will only “scatch out” what I took away from this session.

A typical bank consists over one of the axis the LOBs or Lines of Business and the other the front, middle and back office.

The front office can be typified by: distinct functions usually traders, very high volumes and chaotic. The middle office is where the computational stuff happens but some similarity between function usually risk management with also high volumes but not as high as the front office and more a kind of ordered chaos. Finally the back office which can be described as a SSC or Shared Service Center which implies more similar functions, low volume and an almost leisurely atmosphere.

Painfully, there is a lot more Java going on here than any of the Microsoft languages and I do not count C++ as a Microsoft language only Visual C++ because that is not ANSI compliant.

The speaker obviously had decades of experience and that showed.