In order to support phasing out bearer securities, the central bank tracks their registration status and makes it available to third parties such as banks, brokers and notaries. Data is provided by securities depositories. COBOL is used for data management and data is stored in a DB2 database on an IBM z/OS mainframe. The data is entered and can be queried across a web interface implemented in Java/JEE running on WebSphere. Alternatively, some clients mirror and redistribute the data based on XML messages. The initial message sequence sent to a new subscriber contains a complete dump of the database. Subsequent messages are updates.

NBB/BNB is the clearing organization for securities issued by the Belgian state. These securities may also be used as collateral for debt. Hence the DB2 databases for clearing and collateral management evolved together and became entangled. The aim of the refactoring project is to ensure that these application suites become decoupled. In order to do so, the data model needs to be changed. This, in turn, has an effect on the applications that use the data, notably the web-facing JEE applications as well as the COBOL batch jobs.

Reference: Marc Lejoly