In the recent years, Alerant has led several projects for domestic banks aimed at the integration of electronic channels and at the preparation of the related necessary complementary applications. These different components made up its electronic channel package that includes not only transaction integration elements, but electronic contracting and SMS service management as well.
Alerant Flexible Electronic Banking components:
- General Order Transmission System (GOTS)
The central element of the Alerant Flexible Electronic Banking package is the General Order Transmission System (GOTS). This is an asynchronous transaction management framework which logs, stores and forwards the incoming transaction requests to the background systems. The GOTS hides all the problems from the sender applications that originate from slow operation or failures of the recipient systems. It also handles cases when it is not possible to forward the transaction to the target system due to business rules (e.g. cut-of time). The application performs all-round logging, so all transactions can be traced back and resent subsequently if necessary.
- Standard Contract Database (SCD)
The purpose of the Standard Contract Database (SCD) is to store electronic contracts and to provide information to other systems (e.g. the SMS System) online. SCD stores contracts in a meta-based system, so these may contain any number of parameters. In most of the cases it is possible to create a new contract without programming. There is a common WebService interface available for contract management. The system is capable of calculating monthly and ad hoc fees and charging them to the contracts (via GOTS).
By using the SMS System, SMS messages and e-mails can be generated and forwarded to the customers upon different events or on a scheduled base. The system has a common WebService interface through which the registered applications can send out their messages. The interface receives the event (e.g. charge) information through the queues, and as a result it sends out the messages based on the SCD contract information.
- Call Center Process Integrator
The purpose of this component is to handle process instances necessary for the call center interface operations. This framework is driven by a BPM-based process engine (JBPM), where the running method of the single processes can be formulated. The diverts according to the „four eyes principle”, the transaction limits and the customers’ requests can be set here (handling of supervisors and call backs). The individual process instances may also be managed on an administrative interface, and we can find here the statistics too.
- FIF – Front-end Integration Framework
The FIF provides a general framework that makes it possible to run different web-based AJAX applications on a common interface (FIF-UI) and, on the other hand, to realize a regulated data interchange between applications (FIF-BB). With the help of FIF-BB, applications operating out of the FF-UI framework may also send and receive information (e.g. data of a selected customer).
