Case Study

BankBoston - Chile

In 1998 BankBoston contacted Ki Teknology to assist it in the launching of its Internet Banking project. Ki Teknology should be directly involved in developing the middleware to make the connection between the AS/400 system and the front end application under a Windows NT based architecture. That's how Ki Teknology used its product "KEPLER Transactional Framework "(which was the first Latin American solution that implements the Microsoft Distributed interNetworking Application Architecture DNA in a mission critical application) and started a long process with the Bank that continues today with the intensive utilization of this product in almost all the Bank's channels. One result expected was simplicity and speed to respond to business changes by making it easy too add new features and reutilization as a basis for solutions in others channels such as BostonExpress and the Commercial Platform.

BankBoston Chile Profile

BankBoston Chile opened its first office in 1979 and today is the second largest American bank in the country with assets in excess of 1 billion pesos and a portfolio of approximately 45,000 clients.

Bank Boston is a FleetBoston Financial Corporation Group company; it has more than 38 branches in Chile and 1,100 employees. The main services provided by Bank Boston are checking accounts in pesos and dollars, term deposits, debit cards, credit cards, personal and business credits and mortgage loans, among others.

The main competitive advantage of this company is its strong image, customer service and its continuous technological innovation.

Analysis of the Problem

When the Information Systems department began to rapidly grow Bank Boston initiated an evaluation of creating a new Internet channel and Ki Teknology was invited to participate in the launch of the Internet Banking project.

The main difficulty of this project was the communication between the AS/400 and the web pages. Another important issue was the necessary performance to achieve the goal of allowing clients to make online transactions and consultations.

The platform to use should be Windows NT Server.

Solution

The first stage of the project was the creation of a communication interface between the AS/400 and Windows NT Server. To do this, many communication tests were performed between these two platforms such as communication through TCP/IP and SNA Server with APPC and LU 6.2. Finally we decided to use the SNA solution with APPC communication, this enabled us to establish a single LU 6.2 connection with the AS/400 and keep up to 256 independent parallel sessions giving us a good response time.

The second stage starts with the "Kepler Transactional Framework" configuration, as well as the construction of the components for all the required transactions. Another complex matter appears in this stage: the historical information of some clients was in a Sybase Database. Taking advantage of the flexibility of the framework we solved the problem without major problems.

And that's how the first solution in Chile was created that fully implements the Microsoft Distributed InterNetworking Application Architecture (DNA).

The system has enough capacity to provide for a margin of growth. In the beginning the initial demand was 5,000 transactions/day, today it manages about 18,000 transactions/day.

Benefits for the Company

The main benefit of this solution is the flexibility it gives to the bank to adapt their systems to changes in their business. "Banking is a changing business, that's why we must be able to react immediately to external changes"

As a middle and long term benefit, projections estimate a significant decrease in hardware and software acquisition costs including those costs associated with administration and maintenance of systems.

Finally, this solution contributed to the positioning of Bank Boston as a company at the forefront of technology and customer service, which helps promote customer retention and attracts new potential clients.

As an example of this, our solution is in a 90% reuse to give services to BostonExpress and BostonPhone channels.

Currently, Bank Boston is running the Bank Commercial Platform, which was implemented 100% by KEPLER Technology. This solution is the same as both channels previously mentioned and reuses 90% of the components developed in Internet Banking and uses XML messaging.

In December 2001 BankBoston bought the customer portfolio of the ABN-AMRO Bank (Chile) and another 8 branches were incorporated. This demonstrates the "Zero Administration" concept because when they incorporate the new branches there was no need to make any changes to the Commercial Platform; we merely had to install Internet Explorer on the executives' machines.

Finally, we have to mention that all the projects used RUP (Rational Unified Process) as the development process, which is an engineering process where best practices in software development are used to enable us to achieve our goals and success in projects under development.

Learned Lessons

When such a strong technological change is implemented, it is necessary to get initial support from key persons in the organization who can help guarantee successful project execution, and to have professionals with extensive experience in the orderly transition to new technologie. Every project starts with assembling teams from BankBoston and Ki Teknology who meet these criteria.

It is also essential to achieve good teamwork among users. This is a key issue to attain a high level of users' satisfaction. This was rated in the case of the Commercial Platform and its high level of acceptance was part of a process of presentations and education to all users and a controlled implementation branch by branch.