In order to submit their loan requests at Banco de la República Oriental de Uruguay, pensioners first need to receive an authorization from Banco de Previsión Social, the national bank in charge of their pensions.
The system, which has been developed by Interfase, is called Sistema de Caja Nacional (SCN) National Payment System - and assesses whether pensioners fulfill all the requirements to proceed with a loan request. For instance, the system checks whether a monthly pension will be enough to pay back a loan. If there were a mistake in this type of assessment, the BPS would not be able to withdraw money from a pensioner's account as payback, and would thus be incurring a loss.
The authorization process takes only a few minutes, and once the request is authorized, Banco República directly handles all the paperwork. At that point, it is up to the latter to decide whether the loan will be granted or not, and BPS is notified through its SCN (National Payment System).
The system has been developed with GeneXus version 7.5 and generated in Java in three tiers. The implementation, however, has been performed in only two. The web interface has made things much easier for starting with the system's production since it did not require installation for each of the clients, who are actually scattered throughout the country. This means that they only need one browser to access the application.
Ever since production started, last December, the system has been used simultaneously by up to 800 users. During this time, the number of processed requests reached 1,600, the highest so far.
Communication between SCN and people's corporate bases, the unified issuance and payment system (SUEP) also developed with GeneXus, and the BPS re-engineering system is established through links in the Oracle database.
Banco de Previsión Social, has done business with Interfase for a long time. The bank has already used the PAYROLL system for Salary Payment and Human Resources, which had also been developed with GeneXus.
General architecture, Tier 1: Presentation and Services1.1. Presentation: deals with sorting out the users' interface. It is carried out through html pages, which are dynamically generated by JAVA servlets executed by the IBM WebSphere server. Requests are automatically rerouted by the corresponding Web Server (in this case, BPS uses a WebSphere).
1.2. Services: Group of programs containing the necessary logic for fulfilling requirements from the SCN, which has also been developed in JAVA.
Tier 2: Lastly, there is the data tier, embodied in the SCN's Oracle base as well as in the different APIs present in the remaining systems at BPS: SUEP (Unified Issuance and Payment System), RING (the bank's Re-engineering System), and the bank's CORPORATE base. Any of these systems can be accessed by using the OracleThin jdbc driver, included in Oracle distributions.