Bancaja
A new archive for Bancaja
Bancaja is one of the largest banks in Spain with five thousand employees, over more than one thousand branch offices and more than twelve hundred cash machines throughout Spain and its Islands. Bancaja is one of the entities with major volume of issue securities in Europe.
Requirements for a New Document Archive
The Beta Systems team met with Fernando Fons, director of the IT department of Bancaja, Miguel Ricart, project manager, and some of their colleagues at Bancaja’s headquarters in Valencia.
During the meeting, the team was told that the vendor of Bancaja’s old Mainframe- based archive system had announced it was withdrawing support for the archive. Bancaja used this archive to store all the relevant banking information. At night, several production runs were performed to consolidate all the daily transactions in the database systems and to produce business reports from the consolidated information for internal and external use. These reports were then stored in the archive system for future access. The information was kept in the archive for up to five years. The archive consisted of a software layer to store and retrieve the data according to external requests and a media layer that actually stored the data. The software layer writes to and reads from the storage layer and is able to quickly access stored data.
As a result of the withdrawal of support, Bancaja was forced to introduce a new archive system. One of the immediate requirements was that content of the old archive had to be migrated to the new archive.
During the meeting, Miguel Ricart (Project Leader) and Fernando Fons (Technology Systems responsible) produced some large diagrams, detailing Bancaja’s IT architecture. Going though the drawings, they explained that there were three relevant IT subsystems. The TL4 Mainframe- based system contained the large DB2 databases and the associated banking applications. This system was connected to a Windows-based internal system, called NPO. Finally, there was a Web-based system for client access, called Bancaja Proxima (BP). This system supported client access to all relevant banking information.
Bancaja stated that the vendor of the new archive system should provide integrated access to the archive through both the Client Web environment as well as the NPO system.
The Beta Systems team demonstrated Beta’s 93 Output Management system with the Beta 93 Fast Retrieval archive (Beta 93 FR) and the Beta Web Interface Facility (WIF) to Miguel Ricart and Fernando Fons and his team. Beta 93 is a z/OS-based Output Management system for large data centers and is used by many banks across Europe. The Fast Retrieval system provides fast access to stored data by using several technologies including indexing and smart caching strategies for data retrieval. The Beta Web Interface delivers access to the documents in a Web environment.
Developing a Solution
Shortly after this initial meeting there were more meetings led by Miguel Ricart and with employees from different IT groups within Bancaja. It became clear that the internal NPO system was built using Microsoft®’s DCOM ® technology. The Bancaja Proxima solution was built on top of a Bea WebLogic® environment, running on UNIX servers.
If a client wants to view an account statement, the system would access the archive system and display the information in a textual format on the client screen – which looked very different to a normal printed account statement. If technically possible, Bancaja wanted to improve this solution so that the Web account statement would have the same visual appearance as the printed one. The original account statement in the archive is an AFP document. As a client typically has no AFP viewer, the AFP document had to be converted to a different document format. As most clients have a PDF viewer, Bancaja asked Beta Systems if it was possible to convert the AFP account statements and other AFP documents into PDF documents.
Back in Berlin, the team discussed the Bancaja requirements with colleagues from its development labs and with Compart, one of Beta Systems’ partners. Step by step, a dedicated solution for Bancaja took shape.
Previously, Beta Systems had started some improvements on its WIF component. Many of Beta Systems’ customers wanted to personalize Web access to the archive data with their Corporate Identity style. Also, the WIF solution used an older JAVA® technology where applets like a Linemode Viewer were sent to the client’s desktop system. In an environment with restricted bandwidth, the sending of an applet could block the transmission lines for a length of time.
At the time the team was developing the Bancaja solution, the DMS business unit in Berlin had just released the first version of a successor to WIF called Beta Web Enabler. Beta Web Enabler was developed by using the Java 2 Enterprise Edition technology.
In this first version, the Beta Web Enabler provided a Web user interface to the Beta 93 product family using Open Source Web and application server, Tomcat and JBoss. This solution had to be adapted to run in a Bea WebLogic environment and to provide the conversion facility. Beta Web Enabler’s standard user interface had to be replaced by the existing Bancaja Proxima user interface, which in turn had to be adapted to the new Beta 93 FR archive functionality. So, the Beta Web Enabler had to be accessible through an application programming interface (API). The BWE API was developed by adapting the existing older WIF interface to the new J2EE technology. It was decided to run the relevant components separately using Remote Method Invocation (RMI® technology).
Compart helped with the AFP to PDF conversion. It turned out that the DocBridge Toolkit provided just the right functionality and performance for this critical task.
Bancaja selected the proposed solution from Beta Systems and asked Beta Systems to act as a coordinator for all the other vendors involved in the project. A project team was set up with members from both Bancaja and Beta Systems and the project commenced. The Beta Systems’ solution was installed in several steps in Bancaja’s test and integration environment. Once everything was working well, the components were uploaded into the live environment.
The Web Solution
Access to a document starts with a user request, e.g. the user wants to download his/her latest account statement. This request is handled by the Web application server as a “download request” with a “conversion request”. The application server uses the Beta Web Connector to access the Beta 93 Fast Retrieval archive to get the corresponding document. The document is then transferred to the conversion server (running on a separate server) for appropriate conversion (AFP to PDF in this case). The conversion is quickly performed and the converted document returned to the Web application server which then sends it to the Web client.
In every Web access project, security is a key issue. In Bancaja’s case, the client authentication and principal authorization information is kept in a database system. When a client tries to connect to Bancaja Proxima, the Web application server gets the user identification data and asks the database system for authentication. After a positive authentication, the client authorization information is available in BP as a binary large object (Blob). It was decided to transport this information in a transparent way through all intermediate system layers to the archive system where the client access to a particular document is checked. For this purpose the Blob is transferred from the archive software through a special security gate to a dedicated checker routine which returns an “allowed” or “not allowed” decision to the archive. If the answer is “allowed”, the corresponding document is extracted from the archive and returned to the Web application server.
Conclusion
The new solution delivers improved value to Bancaja’s customers. Account statements and other documents are sent to Web clients in the same format as if the documents were printed in the Bank. Access and response times are also improved.
According to Vicente Tos Viala, IT Systems Manager at Bancaja, “We are very pleased with the solution that Beta has provided us with. We are able to offer our internal and external customers improved access to account statements. Feedback has already been very positive. At moment, we have 2,500 client visits per day on our service web site and we expect 10,000 visits per day in the near future.”