Web services case study and implementation in financial industry

Abstract

Web services refer to a family of technologies that can universally standardize the communication of applications in order to connect systems, business partners, and customers cost-effectively through the World Wide Web. Web services will ease the constraints of time, cost, and space for discovering, negotiating, and conducting e-business transactions. As a result, they dramatically changed the way businesses design their applications as services, integrate with other business entities, manage business process workflows, and conduct e-business transactions. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the current state of Web services technology and to evaluate the potential effectiveness of this technology for financial industry. By conducting several case studies, the advantages of Web services implementation are discussed, including financial areas and other related E-businesses. Non-technical aspects of Web services such as the value added, cost reduction, implementation contraction, project reusability, and business expanding are discussed as well. To demonstrate the use of Web services for financial industry, three Web service application prototypes were built within different domains relevant to international trading procedure. This simulation project is judged to be a successful demonstration of the potential applications of Web services for financial industry.