Electronic Data Processing Application In Banking

Banks basically handle money and money related information This information is transmitted far and wide across geographical boundaries. Banking transaction volumes are so huge that without electronic data processing (EDP), banks would not be able to manage the tasks. Globalization demands that capital transfer should be affected as quickly as possible. Of course the movement of liquid cash would be impractical in this case, because it is slow, cumbersome and risky. There is no better means to achieving this than fully integrating current IT and other technological innovations, in essence treating money as nothing short of information.The World Wide Web (Internet) offers immense functionalities to the banking industry. This is because it is cheap and fast, and in it physical location is immaterial. Moreover, banks need not invest so much in hardware and network infrastructure, since the necessary telecommunication backbone is already available. Financial transactions, as conventionally carried out before, require a high level of confidentiality, integrity of data, authenticity, and non-repudiation of origin. These requirements are not very easily realized in the free and unsupervised Internet environment. But for any transaction to be safe enough and legally binding, all these must be taken into account. Security procedures for both the brick-and-mortar bank and the Internet bank have been analyzed and a model proposed.This project tries to incorporate a multi-tier two level architecture that successfully avails itself to the needs of banks and their customers. Client/Server architecture is implemented for daily transaction and administrative activities of banking accounts. The web architecture enhances services and brings them closer to customers, whenever and wherever they are. A number of services have been integrated in the web-based application to compliment what can be done using the brick-and-mortar banking concept. Of mention is the online report generating tool, an overdraft protection utility and wired cash transfer facility.The design also goes further and try as much as possible to effect the requirements for a secured Internet banking system, and how such a system may be realized practically in a real world situation. Secure data transmission in the stack protocol, that sends customers' requests ("html forms") to the bank's web server, has been identified as the ultimate means for attaining this security. This can only be achieved by a good protocol that uses cryptographic techniques in encoding transmitted data, and decoding at the receiver end Windows 2000 Server's Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) has been deployed together with TCP/IP configured with IPSec security to realize this. A viable and robust Certification Authority architecture has been designed. For availability, a connection algorithm, that uses multiple identical database servers, has been designed and implemented The algorithm assumes the presence of M Window 2000 servers,in same network segment, each with K data sources (SQL Servers). Connectivity is negotiated thus: loop through all data sources in all the servers until accessibility is attained else abort connection.To ensure safeguard against online fraud an account locking facility has been designed. With this tool a client can lock his account effectively preventing withdrawals and transfers against such an account. A locked account can only be unlocked physically by presenting credentials at a nearest branch. The locked account table contains a column/field that shows whether or not transactions were attempted against the account. This has been achieved by using a "locked level status" attribute that has default of "0" and takes the value "1" if the account has been tampered with.The system also has a back-end security monitoring tool that shows record of login attempts: as "1?for success and "0" for failure. Operators with *0" login status are immediately contacted and instructed to change their passwords. The back-end tool also shows currently logged in ope...