CIBC Optimizes Processing With Real-Time Monitor

With more than 10,000 mortgage transactions a day, Canadian banking giant CIBC needed a solution to ensure that its mortgage processing system was performing at its maximum.

There's nothing worse for clients than funds not showing up on closing date, notes Harry Hallworth, director of operations information technology for Toronto-based CIBC Mortgages. Because of the time-sensitive nature of mortgage processing, CIBC needed a system that monitored workflow queues and alerted the bank if things were backing up.

The solution was BusinessBridge, a real-time business and IT management solution from Systar, Fairfax, Va., that helps managers optimize their complex business environments. BusinessBridge sits atop CIBC's mortgage application and makes sure that transactions are flowing smoothly end to end, i.e., "that faxes are getting out and not building up on a fax server, that documents are getting printed and not queuing up in an engine waiting to be generated and that workflow queues are not getting overflowed because of a slowdown in a server," said Hallworth.

The mortgage system itself-a multi-platform application running on mainframes, UNIX, NT and AS/400-is workflow-driven and generates sophisticated documents and faxes. "It's a multi-platform, multi-technology application," Hallworth explained. CIBC relies on the application to advance mortgage funds and get the money into the hands of lawyers on closing day.

CIBC had planned to build its own monitoring application, but after running cost estimates realized it was much more economical to go with BusinessBridge. The bank is now looking at using the software in other business applications.