InfoBank - WebSelfCare Internet Banking System

Abstract

InfoBank-WebSelfcareis the proposed project which is an internet banking module designed and developed for Informatics International Ltd.(IIL) a reputed company, registered in Sri Lanka, providing innovative solutions, quality customized software and reliable support services in the local and foreign IT industry for the last 20 years.

‘InfoBank’ is a comprehensive in-house developed retail banking solution for all sizes of banks. It is a module based banking application which covers nine main modules (Normal savings, Fixed deposits, Call deposits, Saving certificates, Loans, Leasing, Hire purchases, General ledger, and Sales commissioning) and three sub modules (cheque clearance, Standing orders and customer relationship management) and runs on Windows platform. It is also enriched with external connectivity for ATMs (Automated Teller Machine) and web applications. The need of the Internet banking module was highlighted when the ‘InfoBank’ application was proposed as a solution for potential customers in local and in overseas.

Internet Banking is a web application which provides the facility for customers to conduct financial transactions such as fund transfers, bill payments, balance inquiries to name a few, via Internet. Mainly there are two types of users, Personal and Corporate users. Theses two types of users differ in functionality and authorization mechanism.

Online banking solutions for individual customers have many features in common. Balance inquiry, Account statements, History details, Bill payments and fund transfers are some of them. Main constraints in designing and implementing such a system was providing security and adaptability to the changing technical and social environment.

When designing a marketable product there are additional set of challenges (e.g. study of market requirements, high customization, ease of implementation) need to be properly addressed. Requirement study was based on two different surveys done at user level and bank level. Findings of the survey are summarized and present in this document. The purpose of this project is to design and develop InfoBank-WebSelfCare which is the proposed internet personal banking solution for IIL targeting the individual users in the local market.

InfoBank-WebSelfCare was developed using open source technologies where PHP as the programming language and My SQL as the back end data base. Unicode was used to implement the system in Sinhala and Tamil. To maintain high customization and to improve performance XML and CSS technologies were used. Finally a successful attempt was done to introduce a facility to retrieve information in audio form targeting visually handicapped audience.