On-line Statement Retrieval System

The client

IKANO Financial Services Limited, a part of The IKANO Group, operates throughout Scandinavia and Germany, providing a range of easy-to-use financial services. Its UK business is based in Nottingham and was established in 1994. IKANO provides customized convenient financial products and support services, including multi-product credit services to multiple retailers, store and budget card, interest free credit and interest bearing loan agreements.

 

"I think you've done a good job and worked very hard to get the project to a stable enough state before we brought it in house..." Ms. Gemma Brierley IKANO Financial Service Ltd.

 

What IKANO wanted

In order to establish its customer service network, IKANO needed to develop an On-line Statement Retrieval System, which enabled the customers to retrieve their statement, including information in transaction history, balance, credit limit, etc., through the company's website In addition, this system should offer a back-end administration system to the administrator.

Approach

The key elements of the solution are as follows:

• The conversion of the EBCDIC code data file to SQL Server 7.0 database. The EBCDIC file, with the record format of 500 bytes fixed- length, comes from another system, which records the recent one month consumption details of each account. In order to import the EBCDIC code data file into SQL Server 7.0 database, we need to convert the data file of EBCDIC code to ASCII code and then write to database.
• The on-line generation of printable bill with changeable format. Another function of the system was to offer on-line bill inquiry for the customer. Different customer might get different account format after login, i.e. with or without Logo. To achieve this function, we needed to offer a customizable template. We adopted PDF for development. The different PDF templates could be added to the different customers. When the customers login and inquiry their bill, the system used the corresponding template and the data imported into the SQL Server database to generate a PDF file for customers to view and print.
• View bills after the installation of Acrobat Reader4.0 at the customer end.
  Users could not view the bills with Acrobat Reader4.0 or former version installed at the client end. We named the PDF file according to the user session ID and linked the URL address of the file to the browser. In this way, the PDF files could be viewed by all version of Acrobat Reader.

Benefits

Shinetech adopted the three-layer architecture (Business logical layer, Business data layer, Business presentation layer) to design and develop the whole system. Such system has great flexibilities and capability for future development.

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