Collaborating with customers and end users (Simple)

While writing this book, I interacted with several people who work at financial services at higher and senior management levels, to understand the challenges faced by them in the financial sector. One of the feedback received was that competition was getting tougher in the financial sector with private houses entering the banking and investment sector, and government allowing them to operate legally as long as they comply with the regulatory requirements.

The survival of these institutions depends on a very thin profit margin. With competition at its highest level, it gives them minimum scope to reject customers' request or deny customer satisfaction. They also need to be technically up-to-date to survive and meet customers' demands. There is no single technology, business process, or a single software application that can solve all the business requirements of an enterprise organization—be it a bank, an insurance company, or any other financial services. The solution architecture always comes with multiple technologies and applications working closely together. Some of the standard and reference architectures and prebuilt process packs help to a large extent, especially with respect to regulatory requirements, compliance, standard-based architecture, best practices, and ease of use.

Getting ready

Before we begin, make sure to download the source code from the previous recipe.

In this recipe, we will expose a lightweight, fast-to-load mobile user interface for our customers, as a web-based user interface can be very heavy and non-user friendly on mobile devices. We will also create a few backend tables to display changes in the rate of interest of both fixed and variable rates over a period of time. We will use these tables in creating business reports and analytics for our business analysts.

How to do it…

Let's perform the following steps:

1. From the JDeveloper let's open the Loan EMI UI Fusion ADF project that we created earlier in the Implementing a home loan process recipe.

2. Create a simple JSPX page that can render on mobile devices. Let's drag-and-drop the data controls on the page as Trinidad components, which are preferred lightweight components on mobile devices.

3. Deploy the process, access it over a mobile device or a mobile simulator, and test it.

4. Log in to WebCenter Portal and click on the Administration link.

5. Under the Administration tab, click on the Resources tab and in the Mashup Styles, select Create Data Control.

   Note

   These tables populate data pushed by one or more business processes.

6. Log in to WebCenter Content Server (http://localhost:16200/cs) and check in an HTML file that can be a public facing corporate page. Also, check in the related CSS and images files into a public folder, or a private folder, depending on the content security

How it works…

The output of this recipe is a customer facing portal that is also a part of a corporate intranet and extranet requirement, driven by the business process and business requirements.

Let us see how the whole setup of BPM, OSB, WebCenter Content, WebCenter Portal, BAM, and ADF Mobile work together from a financial services point of view.

1. James Cooper (loan applicant) checks the James Bank website on his mobile device to see if he has loan eligibility or not. Based on whether or not he does, the system generates a unique request ID that he can use later on for applying a loan.

   Note

   For more details, refer to the How it works… section of the Implementing a home loan business process recipe.

2. James Cooper visits the customer portal and sees the promotional campaign.

   

3. James Cooper applies for a home loan, as discussed in the Integrating with business partners recipe.

4. This action sends notification e-mails to Conan Doyle (Application Verification Officer) and John Steinbeck (Field Officer). They will verify the application and approve it to the next level.

5. The application is routed to the KYC check. An e-mail is sent back to James Cooper asking for KYC-related documents.

6. James Cooper logs in to the portal again, and submits the required KYC documents such as the Income Tax PAN, photograph, and passport copy.

7. The request is routed to Irving Stone (Partner Quote Officer) of Loren Kelleher Bank, and he sends a quote.

8. The quote is finally reviewed by William Faulkner (Finance Officer) of James Bank.

9. William Faulkner logs in on the WebCenter Portal's intranet and views some of the business dashboards that are related to changes in the rate of interest, the current status of various applications, corporate news, and any other task that needs his approval and decision making.

   

There's more…

BPM can be a great solution for financial services when viewed from the perspective of various roles, as discussed in the book. BPM with other Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies can help bring IT and the business closer together, increase customer satisfaction and corporate collaboration, and help to meet necessary regulatory requirements. It also helps to keep pace with changes in market trends and business dynamics, and to help adapt to new and emerging standards-based technologies and applications. As a next step, you might also want to have a look at ready-to-use Oracle BPM Process Accelerators for financial services.