Wim Geurden

Questions about Web services and their uptake in financial services create a very black/white answer set. Some claim there's no usage; others say critical mass has been reached. The answer is somewhere in the middle. One goal of the SOAP and UDDI message set was to let people discover services on the Web, and then connect to and start using them. We'd go shopping for mortgages and insurance policies by querying UDDI repositories and connecting to them. That hasn't happened. This vision was born during the dot-com craze and several aspects weren't defined: how to pay for such services, how to differentiate between them, and how consumers connect to them. The uptake of consumer-oriented Web services hasn't happened, which often leads to the conclusion that Web services have failed. Web services also sought to offer better integration of the business processes of a val... (more)