Backbase Grand Central iPaas Data Modeling

What Backbase does

Backbase, is a banking solutions provider, that focuses on streamlining the user journeys for everything related to a bank: customer onboarding, case management, accounts, transactions, payments, fraud checks, KYC, AML for retail, business, wealth banking and credit unions as well as many more capabilities are supported through its Model Bank solution. Model Bank is a full suit of applications: mobile app to be used by customers, back office applications to be used by bank employees, an integration layer for all these applications as well as their internal databases, with both managed services and on-premise options. Any bank is able to start using Model Bank given that the rest of the application landscape is able to communicate with Backbase's Model Bank solution.

What Grand Central aims to solve

Model Bank is a very opinionated solution that might not be suitable especially for every bank out there from various perspectives:

1. Data ingestion & integration pattern problems: Some applications in banking industry, (e.g. Core Banking applications) are notoriously bad at exposing their data to external services, not to mention the supported ways of integration (SOAP, RESTful, or even message broker). A solution that offers multiple ways of ingesting data to and fro Model Bank is often needed per each bank.

2. Data Modeling Challenges: Every application has their own terminologies, and expect data in a specific format which requires custom implementations every time. With a unified front end solution, this becomes another bottleneck because the data needs to be transformed specifically for each integration.

3. Repetitive work: So many times, customer success teams build the same integration that they have previously done with a different customer over and over for newer customers. That creates repetitive work and takes a lot of time at the project beginning phase.

How ?

Enter BIAN. A unified and ubiquitous language model for common data model implementation, as well as API specification. BIAN, while treated as a guide, provides clear structures for data models for every entity within a banking space. Every banking term like loan account, deposit account or even non-banking specific basic common models such as location are declared publicly declared with ISO20022 BM references. BIAN even offers sample API specifications with most expected actions through their API portal. While those endpoints do not fully support RESTful practices (e.g. endpoint names are verbs, which doesn't align with RESTful practice. See an example here).

My contribution

Through all the OOTB connectors of Grand Central and all the API's and event specs, I have streamlined the entire data model structures for every model that Grand Central supported at that time. Aligned with the Integration Authority Board of Backbase to review the entire data models, and collected feedback. Compared the new datamodels to the existing Grand Central API specs and prepared the impact, aligned with the teams, got into their roadmap and guided them into implementing the differences from the Common Data Model store.

Goal of this initiative

Common Data Model store is the golden source of truth for - REST API specification models (both as-is ones and the ones that will be implemented in the future) - Event specs (again, both as-is ones and the ones that will be implemented in the future)

It is also a knowledge base and a crucial part of developer experience value proposition of Grand Central, therefore it adds commercial value to Grand Central suite as well.