Reserve Bank to deploy new core IT platform

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has tendered for a replacement core banking solution that will process in excess of 320 million payment and 25 million collection transactions each year.

In a tender issued Friday, the RBA said that it was seeking a more “contemporary” architecture and platform to provide greater responsiveness to customer requirements.

In its 2014 Annual Report, the bank said it was undertaking work to upgrade its banking systems and re-engineer a number of business processes to ensure that they remain cost effective.

The work is occurring in stages over several years. The first stage – involving the processing of real time gross settlement (RTGS) payments for agencies – was completed mid last year.

Work has commenced on the second stage, which involves redevelopment systems for processing payments to the government and its agencies, the report said. The RBA has employed business analysts, application developers, testers and project managers to complement the bank’s existing resources.

The RBA provides banking services to the Australian government, several agencies, central banks, and overseas institutions. Customer numbers are low but transaction volumes and values can be significant, the RBA said.

The bank said the system needs to support highly available transaction processing environment. It also needs to integrate with and support compatible processing with existing banking and ancillary systems and channels. It will also need to support active/active processing with site rotation as required, the RBA said.

According to the tender, mandatory technologies include Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Relational Database Server, and Microsoft Active Directory for identity management integration.

Integration technologies need to be based on common industry standards for secure file transfer like Secure FTP, and secure assigned messaging technology like MQ messaging

The RBA will host the system internally on its existing hardware infrastructure running Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems and support programming languages such as Java, C, or .Net. If another language is used, the respondent must outline plans to minimise risk from obsolescence and related issues in skills scarcity, the RBA said.

Server virtualisation capabilities will be provided using VMware vFabric tc Server or Oracle Weblogic. If another solution is proposed, respondents will need to outline approaches to minimise risk from obsolescence and ensure interoperability with the existing environment, the RBA said.

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