A dynamic business banking web service

Abstract

It is a reality that a high percentage of banking systems within large financial institutions are a legacy. At the time of their deployment, interfacing to other systems was not part of the agenda of their sponsors and developers. With the advent of the Internet, collaboration with other systems has become a must and nowadays systems are not only interfaced with other systems within the same organisation but also with other customer systems. Banking systems are complex in nature and sometimes interfacing to these systems is no easy task. The scope of this project is to try and make this interfacing process between a customer and a financial institutions' system as swift as possible. The first objective is to expose a well defined interface to the customer and hiding the complexities of the interface to the server system by communicating with the web service through standard XML messages. The second objective is to make this interface as flexible as possible by eliminating the need to change the code each time a new service is offered. This, in tum, will drastically reduce the amount of work needed to add functionality to the system, where security and auditing features are of prime importance.