[...]

Nordbanken appeals to

the mass market with help from MQSeries

Money, money, money...

Like Abba, Sweden's world-famous singing group, Nordbanken is

definitely focused on appealing to the mass market. As Sweden's

second-largest bank, Nordbanken wants to be the best bank for the

small private customer and for smaller sized businesses. The bank's

emphasis is on self-service automation, which it supports with a

large ATM (Automated Teller Machine) network, and it is also pursuing

the opportunities provided by Internet banking.

In terms of its computer systems, the bank is largely IBM

mainframe-based but, in common with many banks worldwide, it has

gradually moved to a distributed environment, utilising a wide range

of bank teller and specialised trading floor applications.

With a multitude of operating systems in place or planned MVS/ESA,

AIX, Digital VMS VAX, Microsoft Windows NT and OS/2 the challenges to

the bank have been to link these disparate platforms together, and

forge a path for future development.

[...]

Since OS/2 is the platform of choice for the

bank's branch offices, MQSeries for OS/2 is also used by the bank for

some trading applications that send data to the ledger and back

office systems.

[...]

"Also, with different levels on different platforms, you tend

to get the least common denominator, so when you need to communicate

between VMS and AIX or OS/2 then you use a rather small sub-set of

features. Some we really need, like security, and a minimum of

distributed transaction handling, but we can't really get at that

level of functionality yet. It boils down to education of our

programmers at the end of the day."

[...]