Internet Banking System

Industry

Banking and finance

Customer

Large South African bank

Project Overview

The project was designed to develop a new version of an internet banking application for the retail banking division of a South African bank. The system provides the following functionality:

Viewing accounts with balances
Producing account statements
Inter account transfers
Beneficiary maintenance
Beneficiary payments, including future dated and recurring payments
Deposit account management
Online lending
Secure messages to bank branches
Payments as part of online shopping.

The new application combined the strategic IT architecture of our client with a redeveloped user interface and additional functionality. The customer intended to use the newly developed functionality across multiple channels (e.g. WAP), multiple products (e.g. current account and credit card), and multiple currencies/countries. In addition, the new system was to maximize vendor independence through the use of internationally recognized open standards and to comply with agreed SLA criteria regarding:

Performance
Availability / Reliability
Scalability
Relative running costs
Security.

Project Execution

The Internet Banking System was built as a WebSphere application that accesses business transactions residing on a mainframe. Transaction access was provided through CTG/CICS interfaces.

The IBA responsibilities included:

Requirements analysis
Design
Implementation
Testing
Support.

Environment

Design:

Object Oriented Modeling
Rational Unified Process
Java Servlets
JSP
Unified Modeling Language

Programming languages:

Java
Java Script
HTML

Databases:

IBM DB2

Technologies and development environment:

Visual Age for Java
WebSphere Studio
Application servers
WebSphere Application Server

Other tools:

SecureWay Software (LDAP)

Platform:

OS Solaris

Project Results

The newly–developed Internet Banking System provided the end user with a fast, reliable, and secure interface for financial operations. The customer was impressed with the application's performance because it was able to handle a huge number of concurrent users. As the application involved financial transactions through the web, the security issue was highly critical. No security violations were detected over the entire testing period! Therefore, the customer received a reliable and cost–effective application that provides extensive functionality to bank clients.