Book excerpt: It goes without saying that 2009 was a year of unprecedented change in global banking. The challenges that financial institutions are facing require them to cut costs but also to regain trust and improve the service that they provide to an increasingly sophisticated and demanding set of customers. In the past, siloed and rigid IT systems often inhibited banks in their attempts to re-engineer their business processes. The IBM® smarter banking initiative highlights how more intelligent software can be used to significantly improve the end-to-end integration of banking processes. In this IBM Redbooks® publication, we aim to show how software technologies, such as SOA, Web 2.0 and event driven architectures, can be used to implement smarter banking solutions. Our focus is on CICS® Transaction Server, which is at the heart of most bank's core banking implementations.