Case Study: Banking ApplicationProject Category: DevelopmentThe ClientThe client is a large finance group in Europe which offers short-term home collected credit and the Argos retail card. It provides a range of financial products and services to customers in their own homes with the facilities and conveniences to pay or purchase on a weekly collected basis.
Business NeedsThe client wanted to manage customers’ accounts for Home Direct Loan services and Argos card services by developing Back Office application (a Web based application) and PDA application. The two were supposed to replace old applications which had been run in Mainframe and MS Access for 14 years.
The ChallengesFPT Software was in charge of developing two different applications with different functions, yet the flexible relation between them must be created and guaranteed to run smoothly.
Back Office system will process customers’ accounts information (interest of loan, admin fee, PPI…) and then the business report of each business unit of the client. It also calculates and makes reports for Staff/agent information about commission for loan, commission for cash collection or salary.
PDA application must allow the user to record customer information, new load or sale and to reconcile cash held that user have withdrawn from Bank and given to customer or collected from customer. It must also allow users to download data from Back Office and synchronize changed data with Back Office application via GPRS.
The Solutions The 21-member team started by studying and analyzing the client’s requirements including architect and GUI designs as well as work processes, and took active part at both the broad levels and the more detailed aspects of the design, development and testing of the system that was planned.
This methodology aligned IT solutions to business requirements, and used a wide range of tools - models, methods, techniques, patterns and frameworks - to achieve a smooth translation of enterprise business objectives into an effective IT solution.
FPT Software built the system in line with the following architecture:
The Back Office server side was based on J2EE platform for Sun Solaris operating system. PDA was developed by MS .NET Compact Framework 2.0 platform for Windows Mobile 2003.
The following architecture was applied for PDA:
The system was designed to store information more efficiently using an Oracle Application Server 10G database for Back Office; Oracle Lite 10G for PDA which is very fast, stable and reliable, especially when PDA has limited resources and speed for large data.
Benefits:The client is able to leverage all the advantages of a web-based mobile solution with its new system.
The system is such a cost-effective solution which helps cut down considerable cost for hiring another IT company to operate the former Mainframe system.
The client's teams now can quickly get access to important and time-critical information, thus enabling them to manage their work more effectively.
With the completion of the project, the client had its first hand experience of quality software development outsourcing and paved the way for long-term working between FPT Software and the client.
Technologies Used: J2EE, .NET Compact Framework 2.0, Sun Solaris OS, Windows Mobile 2003, Oracle 10G, JDK 1.4.2, JSTL, XML, CVS, Apache SOAP Web Service Component.
Duration: May 2005 to Sep 2006
Effort: 145 man-months
Team Size: 30 members