With over thirty-years experience developing financial services applications, chances are good that we have experienced a business requirement similar to one you are currently facing. Luckily the move to offer services running on IP has been a driving force to offer specific business functionalities in the form of component-based, industry standard objects.

The appeal of reusable software components lies not only in their self-contained nature, but in their ability to interact with legacy systems.

Components provide autonomous, enterprise level, distributed functionality on the server, as well as help developers define and encapsulate system functionality at different levels of granularity. By adopting component technology, established firms with older systems can more easily compete with new companies that start out with systems designed around cutting-edge component architectures.

Another reason why financial services companies are looking to components for delivering business processes, rather than single-vendor software suite is the "buy versus build problem." A complete package may require very heavy customization, sometimes up to three times the initial license cost. Then again, there are also problems inherent in building systems from scratch; they become proprietary, and the company that creates them must provide its own support and maintenance over the life of the system.

The component model offers the best of both worlds; pre-built components only require customization on the back end for communication with existing systems and on the front end to accommodate a specific look and feel.