VTB and T1 are trying to remove ABS from the "needle" of Oracle DBMS by writing a new system from scratch

As TAdviser found out on November 9, 2023, T1 and VTB are developing an automated banking system (ABS) as part of an import substitution project at the bank. Information on the development of ABS for VTB was made during a presentation during the visit of the first deputy chairman of the Bank of Russia Olga Skorobogatova to the T1 stand at the FINOPOLIS forum, and it was also confirmed by TAdviser sources close to the holding.

Details, however, have not yet been publicly disclosed. But the general director of the holding "T1" Alexey Fetisov, who previously worked at VTB, at the round table "ДОМ.РФ" at FINOPOLIS, without mentioning, however, the name of the customer, spoke a little about the prerequisites and essence of the project for the development of ABS. Also, some information about him is contained in vacancies published in the public domain.

A new ABS on microservice architecture is being developed for VTB "(photo: Sergey Kuksin/RG)"

Import substitution in the field of ABS is one of the strongest headaches of banks, especially large ones. There are domestic ABSs for them on the market, but already existing products are mainly sharpened for imported DBMS, most often for Oracle, and other imported system software. And financial institutions, as critical infrastructure facilities (CII), need to switch to domestic solutions by January 1, 2025. Industry representatives have repeatedly noted earlier, and this time at FINOPOLIS, that in the case of ABS and processing, it is hardly possible to fulfill the import substitution requirements by the deadline.

The general director of the holding "T1" Alexey Fetisov at the round table "ДОМ.РФ" noted that in the financial sector the situation with import substitution in ABS and processing is difficult. This is due to how such systems historically developed in banks: a large DBMS of a "well-known manufacturer" was taken, put on a large piece of hardware from another "well-known manufacturer," and for years the functionality, business processes, calculations, logic, back office were increased for this design, he explained. As a result, after 10 years, the bank turns out to be a "monster" based on expensive "hardware," on which a lot is tied.

Disassembling this story is not only a technical problem. You need to change processes, change the approach, select functions and make appropriate systems for them.

Alexey Fetisov is skeptical about the idea of ​ ​ rewriting the well-known ABS by simply changing the database, because there are huge amounts of logic inside the bases of these systems. Rewriting the code on such a scale will be a nightmare, he believes.

Therefore, we decided to start with one of our large clients from scratch and make ABS on the service platform: that is, not one super-large, but several small systems that close certain tasks, such as settlements, deposits, loans, etc., - Alexey Fetisov shared with market participants at a round table.

The microservice approach makes it possible not only to easily scale the product, but also to gradually automate business functions: for example, to introduce independent solutions for the settlement system, deposits of individuals, settlement and cash services of legal entities, etc., noted in "T1."

From the current vacancies published on recruiting sites, it follows that the Innotech company, which is part of the T1 holding, is actively involved in the development of the import-substituted ABS. The plans are announced large-scale and ambitious. The main task is import substitution of the core banking platform. A completely new system is being developed on microservices: from the kernel to visualization, respectively, no legacy. This platform is responsible for the operation of all banking products, according to the description of a number of vacancies in Innotech for this project^[1] But that's not all.

The potentially developed solution will be turned into a boxed product and offered to other banks (since the top 50 banks of the Russian Federation operate on the current platform, and everyone is faced with the task of abandoning it), - stated in the vacancies for the import substitution project of ABS[2]

One of the vacancies lists the target microservice stack: it includes Apache Spark, PostgreSQL, ETL, Kuber, rest technologies.

Deputy Chairman of the Board of Moscow Credit Bank (MKB) Sergei Putyatinsky at the same round table at FINOPOLIS noted that for a large bank, the change of DBMS in ABS and virtualization system, if the ABS environment is virtualized, as well as the replacement of hardware with OS is a multi-month process. Testing a new loop in its entirety, including DBMS, hardware, OS, virtualization, as well as migrating data to a new ABS takes a long time. The entire process can take 2-3 years on average. The fact is that DBMS in modern ABS contains a lot of logic. Logic is not ported, so when replacing DBMS, all business logic must be rewritten from scratch, and then tested together.

If someone has not already switched to at least load testing and is not at the stage of debugging scripts and data migration, he has little chance of fulfilling the requirements by January 1, 2025, the top manager of the ICD believes.

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