Rebuilding Fannie Mae with TIBCO BusinessWorks and TIBCO Messaging
Delivering services with a fault-tolerant and highly available infrastructure
Challenge
The Need for an Event-Driven Architecture
Fannie Mae is at the very heart of the housing industry, underwriting qualifying loans to provide lenders with the liquidity necessary to keep originating new mortgages. In fact, Fannie is the liquidity provider of choice for American mortgage lenders—one in three homes in the US is financed by Fannie Mae.
There were many integration challenges at the agency, especially following the last recession and housing crisis. The federal government was asking the company to react to the crisis at a faster pace than it anticipated. Because of its IT architecture, it was unable to react to the fast-changing business landscape.
Fannie Mae found its legacy systems were outdated and provided no visibility into the end-to-end business flow. This outdated architecture inhibited resilient and hybrid deployment models. It used batch-based file exchange as the primary content transfer mechanism and custom point-to-point interfaces that were brittle and costly.
Solution
Establishing an Enterprise Data Infrastructure
Fannie Mae turned to TIBCO for a solution. Beginning in early 2008, the company implemented TIBCO BusinessWorks™ for integration and TIBCO® Messaging to enable event-driven operations.
"Our enterprise data infrastructure, one of the largest in the country, is now completely orchestrated using TIBCO BusinessWorks and TIBCO Messaging," said Arindam Gupta, principal architect. "We run several hundred billion dollars' worth of business on this platform, something that has a real impact on the economy."
Its enterprise data infrastructure serves as a single source of truth and incorporates over 90 upstream systems that feed more than 250 downstream systems.
Benefits
Near Real-Time Information for Clients
Before the TIBCO implementation, when homeowners made a mortgage payment, it took downstream systems between two and five days to receive the information. Today, it is instantaneously available.
"It has made a sea of difference to those endpoint systems—accounting, risk, and fraud analysis," said Gupta. "They are getting the data almost in real time from when it reaches Fannie Mae."
Better Service
In addition to improving internal operations, Fannie Mae is helping its partners provide better service to clients. It is helping lenders expose rules so that when an initial mortgage application is made, they can analyze to better understand the quality of the loan.
"That kind of service is made possible because of the investment we made in this infrastructure, and our ability to build services and deliver them faster,” said Gupta.
Mission-Critical Sustainability
With more than 125 major application endpoints connected to the backbone exchanging upwards of 20 million messages per day, TIBCO infrastructure is enabling Fannie Mae to deliver billions of dollars of critical funding to the housing market.
"We are grateful that when we started our journey, we got the right kind of guidance from TIBCO engineers and architects," said Gupta. "We are happy with where we are today."
Future
Fannie Mae is looking at its operations processes to determine what should migrate to the cloud, and possibly implementing a hybrid cloud strategy. It is also looking into experimenting with Apache Kafka, now supported by TIBCO's messaging platform.