Gartner defines a core banking system (CBS) as the financial institution’s back‐office software that performs real-time or end-of-day processing for deposits and loans. Apart from advancing the processing dates, representative capabilities include transaction posting, interest accrual/payment, service charge calculation and cash management (zero balance, target balance). CBSs provide deposit and loan product servicing with interfaces to other applications, such as customer-facing channels, general ledger systems and reporting tools. CBSs can be deployed on the bank’s premises or run from the cloud or any hosted environment. Bank employees and customers either directly or indirectly use the bank’s CBS.
Gartner defines digital banking platforms (DBPs) as a set of modular capabilities that enable the bank to create and customize employee and customer digital journeys. DBPs sit between the bank core and the engagement layer (i.e., multichannel solutions or employee applications) and provide a unified environment for four main technology categories: (1) bank-specific composable business services that constitute user journeys, (2) common platform services that support the composable business services, (3) developer tools for journey creation and customization and (4) modern data and analytics for business intelligence, customer insights and continuous improvement. DBPs are consumed as private cloud SaaS, public cloud SaaS or on-premises.
Gartner defines a trading platform as a computer system designed to perform financial market analysis, capture and process daily treasury transactions, evaluate the risks associated with those transactions, provide settlement and reporting functionality, and post transaction records to accounts and other financial records repositories. Trading platforms directly or indirectly facilitate the placement of orders for financial products with another financial entity or intermediary over a network. These financial offerings include products and asset classes such as equities, bonds/fixed income instruments, foreign exchange, money market/cash instruments, commodities and derivatives. The financial entities involved in the transactions include brokers, market makers/principals, investment banks, universal banks, hedge funds and asset managers. Trading platforms facilitate electronic/digital transactions that may be undertaken by trading firms from any location using available computer networking infrastructure.