ING Group is a Dutch-based multinational banking and financial services corporation serving more than 38 million customers globally. It’s one of the biggest banks in the world, and consistently ranks among the top 30 largest banks globally.
Our 20-year-old COBOL-based financial messaging system — which provides electronic instructions to enable financial transactions between banks and customers — is slowly becoming obsolete and difficult to integrate. COBOL is declining in popularity among developers, and many programmers with COBOL experience are retiring or will soon.
In addition, we’re seeing competition from fintech startups that are lowering the cost of financial messaging while at the same time accelerating processing times.
To ensure ING continues as a global financial leader, it became imperative for us to build a new cloud-technology based financial messaging system to facilitate financial transactions between banks, customers, and third parties.
The Belgian branch of ING was tasked with the challenge of building this from scratch. We chose Elastic because we wanted to future-proof the mission-critical payments processing platform with a widely used technology that scales well as we add more customers and increase load.
Choosing this solution was natural because ING’s global headquarters is working on providing the Elastic Stack as a Service to the rest of our organization to capitalize on the many use cases and value that can be achieved with Elastic.
What is financial messaging?
Financial messaging is a niche and specialized activity in payment processing. It’s a complex and quickly evolving ecosystem where fast and guaranteed delivery is crucial to the success of ING and its customers.
A financial message, in its most basic form, is one that tells one bank to transfer money. Payment messages, which ING routes through the SWIFT Network to external banks, include just about any type of monetary transaction you can imagine. ING is processing 1.5 million financial messages in at least 200 different formats every day with our COBOL platform.
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