The complex world of SAP integration within a major financial institution
The Heart of Transformation
Integration is often described as the "heart" of digital transformation, and at Rabobank—the third-largest bank in the Netherlands—this is especially true. In this episode, experts Gaurav and Dava dive into how they manage integration at scale, moving from legacy on-premise systems to a modern, cloud-first architecture.
Key Highlights and Takeaways
Massive Scale & Straight-Through Processing (STP): Rabobank’s lending and insurance department operates with a 98% STP rate. This means nearly all business processes are automated via APIs with minimal human intervention. To put this in perspective, they handle approximately 1.6 million synchronous read calls and over 300,000 asynchronous calls in just the first half of the year.
The Evolution of the Landscape: The bank has a long history with SAP integration, starting with SAP XI in 2010, moving through PI and PO, and currently migrating to the SAP Integration Suite on BTP (Business Technology Platform). Their strategy is "Cloud First," utilizing multiple hyperscalers including Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
Orchestration Challenges: Because banking services are industry-specific, standard out-of-the-box APIs are rare. The team often has to build custom APIs for complex business processes, such as creating a loan, which requires orchestrating multiple backend entities like business partners, technical accounts, and mandates. They are currently transitioning this orchestration layer from the "Process Object Builder" to Cloud Integration iFlows.
Monitoring and Governance: In a complex environment, monitoring must happen at the business process level, not just the individual iFlow level. The team is exploring SAP Cloud ALM and other external tools like Splunk to ensure they meet strict SLAs, such as ensuring 90% of read calls respond in under two seconds.
Upskilling the Team: A significant part of their success comes from a collaborative learning culture. Rather than traditional classroom training, the team uses "Knowledge Chapters" where developers explore specific areas of the SAP Integration Suite and share findings with the group. They also leverage community content and modern tools like VS Code for XSLT development.
The "Clean Core" Philosophy: While they strive for a "Clean Core," the specialized nature of banking means some custom extensions are inevitable. They manage these by using side-by-side extensions—often Java-based applications running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)—to keep the core SAP system as standard as possible.
Conclusion
The Rabobank journey highlights that successful SAP integration isn't just about the technology; it’s about breaking down silos between front-office and back-office systems and building a team that is agile enough to embrace AI and cloud-native developments.
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