SOA Example - Real-Time Regulation

In a couple of recent posts on Turbulent Markets, I asked whether real-time profit and loss could tame turbulent markets (answer: No), and asked whether some other form of real-time event-driven system could perform a regulatory function (answer: Possibly).

Bloggers from some of the CEP vendors have been making similar suggestions for a while.

Back in March 2008, there was a flurry of interest in the strange fate of Eliot Spitzer, who was apparently exposed by the very regulatory technologies he himself had advocated.

• The Technology That Toppled Eliot Spitzer (Technology Review)
• Algorithms for the War on the Unexpected (Emergent Chaos)

Jesper Joergensen of BEA (BEA now part of Oracle, Jesper has now joined SalesForce, Jesper's BEA blog has disappeared) took the opportunity to put in a plug for BEA's event processing products. "If anyone working in a bank's anti-money laundering, compliance or fraud detection unit is reading this", he writes, "go check out [my company's products]. This is the technology you need to automate these compliance requirements."

There is obviously a need for systems to trap people like Eliot Spitzer. But I'm not convinced that simple compliance systems need to be real-time service-oriented event-driven systems. See my post on Real-Time Fraud Detection.

But a much stronger case can be made for real-time risk management. Chris Martins (Progress Apama) put the case for CEP and real-time risk in March 2008. More recently, Jeff Wotton (Aleri) has put the case for real-time risk consolidation, drawing on an interview with Nick Leeson. Meanwhile, Progress Actional has a product page on Real-Time Risk Profiling for Banks.

The point about real-time risk aggregation is that you need to produce a rapid and reliable picture of total risk, drawing on data from many heterogeneous sources. In a typical business environment, new types of risk and sources of data are constantly being added, and you want to be able to plug these into your risk consolidation straightaway. In this kind of scenario, it should be very easy to justify SOA.