R. Meersman, Z. Tari, P. Herrero et al. (Eds.): OTM 2007 Ws, Part I, LNCS 4805, pp. 158–168, 2007. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007 WSBL: Web Service Architecture for Financial Products Marcos Aza Hidalgo 1 and Jose Luis Bosque Orero 2 1 Allfunds Bank, Fund Research, Investment Consulting Madrid, Spain maza@allfundsbank.com 2 Dpto. de Electrónica y Computadores Universidad de Cantabria Santander, Spain joseluis.bosque@unican.es Abstract. In this paper, WSBL (Web Service Business Library) is proposed as a solution for problems above mentioned, of any company which offers financial services, by combining agents' theory, web services and grid computing. After explaining the solution, this paper presents an example of a web service that prices a weather derivative using the computing power of a grid, but could be easily extended to any financial product. This approach would enable the bank to have only one library for pricing all products running in one grid giving service to all of the trading rooms that a bank could have around the world. These services could be sold to third-party users with the appropriate security services. Some experiments in a real grid environments will be presented to validate and verificate the utility as well as the performance of the proposed approach. 1 Introduction There have appeared many companies and business around financial services. Information, and products sold by banks are offered by non-financial companies to third party users, and an example of this is the business around mortgages and credits. There are two main consequences of these incipient businesses. The products have become more and more complex and the information to be managed is huge but the time-to-market has to be as low as possible. These products are computational demanding and need to manage a huge amount of information. However the response time can not be more than a few of seconds. Moreover they have to be flexible enough to handle very different products and serve them to very different users. In this scenario grid and parallel computing are nature solutions. On one hand, grid computing allows to share resources and services in a secure environment. On the other hand, parallel computing helps to reduce the response time of the service. There have been several works that have exploited the idea of open and flexible architecture. Martin et al [1] explain the structured and elements for the construction of systems based on agents using OOA (Open Agent Architecture), in which various agents help each other under the premise of requiring and/or providing services based on their capabilities.