2        Introduction

In today's turbulent markets, financial institutions require a better understanding of their risk-return, while strengthening competitive advantage and enhancing long-term customer value. Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications (OFSAA) enable financial institutions to measure and meet risk-adjusted performance objectives, cultivate a risk management culture through transparency, lower the costs of compliance and regulation, and improve insight into customer behavior.

OFSAA uses industry-leading analytical methods, shared data models, and applications architecture to enable integrated risk management, performance management, customer insight, and compliance management. OFSAA actively incorporates risk into decision making, enables to achieve a consistent view of performance, promote a transparent risk management culture, and provide pervasive intelligence. OFSAA delivers a comprehensive, integrated suite of financial services analytical applications for both banking and insurance domains. The following figure depicts the various application packs that are available across the OFSAA Banking and Insurance domains.

Figure 1: Application Packs of OFSAA

Topics:

·        Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications Infrastructure (OFSAAI)

·        About the Oracle Financial Services Data Foundation Application Pack 

·        OFS AAI Extension Pack

·        Installation and Upgrade Scenarios

Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications Infrastructure (OFSAAI)

Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications Infrastructure (OFSAAI) powers the Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications family of products to perform the processing, categorizing, selection and manipulation of data and information required to analyze, understand and report on specific performance, risk, compliance and customer insight issues by providing a strong foundation for the entire family of Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications across the domains of Risk, Performance, Compliance and Customer Insight.

Components of OFSAAI

The OFSAA Infrastructure includes frameworks that operate on and with the Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications Data Model and forms the array of components within the Infrastructure.

The OFSAA Infrastructure components or frameworks are installed as two layers; primarily, the metadata server and Infrastructure services run on one layer, while the UI and presentation logic runs on the other. The UI and presentation layer is deployed on any of the supported J2EE Servers.

The following figure depicts the various frameworks and capabilities that make up the OFSAA Infrastructure.

Figure 2: Components of OFSAAI

OFSAA Infrastructure High Availability

The current release of the OFSAA Infrastructure supports only the Single Instance installation for the Infrastructure components. However, the High Availability (HA) for the Database Server and/ or the Web application server clustering and deployment is supported in this release.

This release supports the Active-Passive model of implementation for OFSAAI components. For more information, see the Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications (OFSAA) Configuration for High Availability Best Practices Guide Release 8.1.x.

Deployment Topology

Figure 3: The logical architecture implemented in the OFSAAAI Application Pack

About the Oracle Financial Services Data Foundation Application Pack

Oracle Financial Services Data Foundation (OFSDF) Application Pack provides integrated stress testing and modeling capabilities that you can readily apply across multiple risk areas enabling institutions to devise appropriate enterprise-wide and holistic risk and economic capital strategies.

OFSDF enables you to comply with regulatory requirements on stress testing, enables advanced customer and portfolio analytics, utilize multiple industry-standard techniques, test, and model with complete data integrity.

OFSDF Application Pack includes the following applications:

·        Financial Services Analytical Applications Infrastructure: This application powers the Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications family of products to perform the processing, categorizing, selection and manipulation of data and information required to analyze, understand and report on specific performance, risk, compliance and customer insight issues by providing a strong foundation for the entire family of Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications across the domains of Risk, Performance, Compliance and Customer Insight.

·        Financial Services Big Data Processing: This option includes, into OFSDF, the capability to process data stored in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). With the Big Data Processing (BDP) add-on option, all core data management frameworks within OFSAA such as Data Management Framework (T2T/F2T), Data Quality Framework, and Rules framework are enhanced to operate on both Oracle RDBMS data sources as well as Apache Hive data sources. An OFSAA Run definition can contain tasks that transform data held in the Hive. OFSAA applications that use these frameworks for expressing application logic automatically gain the ability to manage data held in the Hive. The OFSAA platform leverages HiveQL and Map Reduce in order to process data directly in the Hadoop cluster without having to stage data in a relational database.

The application pack includes a logical data model, a physical data model, and supporting scripts.

OFS AAI Extension Pack

The Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications Infrastructure Extension (OFS AAIE) Pack adds a set of new advanced features for 8.1.0.0.0 Release across OFSAA applications. This pack can be installed on an OFSAA instance containing one or more OFSAA application packs.

The Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications Infrastructure Extension Pack includes the following advanced features and functionalities:

·        Distributed Processing Capabilities

·        Analytic Pipeline and Process models

·        Attribution Analysis

·        Content Management Interoperability Services

Installation and Upgrade Scenarios

The OFSDF Application Pack Release v8.1.0.0.0 supports various installation and upgrade scenarios. A high-level overview of the possible scenarios is provided in the following table. The detailed procedural steps are provided in the subsequent sections.

Table 3: OFSDF Release 8.1.0.0.0 Installation and Upgrade Scenarios