Financial Service Providers are essentially information-based businesses: their primary asset is the information they store and share. These companies are struggling today with finding the most flexible and cost-effective means to integrate and aggregate information from a wide range of unstructured and semi-structured enterprise data sources. Today’s integration solutions are either targeted only at structured sources of information such as databases, or are too rigid and expensive to handle enterprise information integration and aggregation needs. Furthermore, the unique requirements of Financial Services firms for real-time, scalable access to disparate information has not been successfully met by today’s vendors.

This paper presents a solution in the form of a mid-tier information aggregation server that provides an XML-based operational data store as a way of providing aggregated access to multiple data sources. Raining Data’s TigerLogic XDMS is used as a strong example of an XML operational data server that provides a way to store and aggregate semi-structured and structured data from a wide variety of sources, XML-enables access to aggregated information and does not require the user to know the structure of data in advance or make any modifications, mapping, or transformations to those data.

Targeted at line-of-business users, corporate architects, as well as IT managers at Financial Services firms, this paper helps readers find a better way to integrate and aggregate disparate systems in the enterprise while lowering costs and off-loading performance from back-end operational servers. Readers will gain a critical understanding of how XML operational data stores can be used in the mid-tier to aggregate data from the heterogeneous sources in the Financial Services enterprise.