Form U126-O394 BANKING.TXT

Ada Information Clearinghouse, 1-800-AdaIC-11 (232-4211), 703/685-1477

KUKOBEZA: Ada Used to Automate Swiss Banking System

by Alan Paterson, Paranor AG

Background

The Swiss post/telegraph/telephone company includes a department that runs a financial payments system. Customers hold interest-bearing accounts, and transactions on these accounts are made in a similar fashion to 'normal' banks. In practice, these accounts form the major means of non-cash payments (also to and from banking accounts) in Switzerland.

Implementation

The project is being realized in two phases. First all customer information is collected in a central database. This information comprises:

• Details of the customer, e.g., address(es)
• Details of all accounts held by each customer
• Details of all Postcards (check guarantee, cash dispenser & EFTPOS) held on each account
• Details of checks issued for each account

This system is therefore the central store of knowledge of all customers using the financial services of the PTT. A few figures:

• 350 graphical workstations throughout Switzerland
• Between 1.2 and 1.4 million customer records and approximately the same number of account records
• ca. 10,000 modifications per day (eight hours)
• ca. 20,000 enquiries per day.
• ca. 7,000 orders for checks per day.

This system has been realized and Version 2 is now in operation. As this article is being written, approximately 1/2 of the data records have been brought on-line and more are coming every weekend. Work is proceeding on Versions 3 and 4 (added functionality).

A few technical details.

• The system consists to-date purely of VAX computers (although it is planned to use Alpha-AXP machines in a future version. There is a central cluster of database servers, connected (by X25) to remote clusters of VAX workstations.
• The operating system is OpenVMS.
• The database system is DEC RdB.
• With the exception of the database interface modules, three macro assembler files and one C source file, all software is written in (DEC) Ada. There exist to-date about 2,200 Ada source files.
• There is extensive use of an in-house CASE tool supporting OOA/OOD and finite-state automata.
• The GUI is implemented with OSF/Motif and is highly structured to use finite-state automata with the previously mentioned tool.
• The GUI is multi-lingual (German, French, Italian), adjusts to the mother-tongue of the user and produces output in the language of the customer.
• Communication between workstations and the central server cluster is via an in-house Remote Procedure Call mechanism which supports load distribution, exception passing over the network and automatic recovery on errors.

Why Ada

Ada has been in use in Paranor since 1985 and there has never been a suggestion that we use anything else. All active programmers are agreed that a switch to another language would mean a marked reduction in programming comfort and ultimately an inferior product. Ada was automatically used in this project. The principal features of Ada which make it superior include:

• Data abstraction/Information hiding. There is extensive use of private and derived types.
• Tasking. Especially for communication between computers.
• Generics. Extensively used in the GUI.
• The ease of calling non-Ada software (although this is less a feature of Ada than of DEC-Ada/VMS)
• The Ada Support system provided by DEC-Ada which makes the administration of the 2,200 source files very much easier (no MAKE files!)
• Highly readable source code.

On Ada9X

Since Paranor produces one-off projects and rarely products, the object-oriented complaint that Ada has only primitive means of inheritance is not a major issue. It is, however, to be expected that the Ada9X features will allow even more elegant programs to be produced.

Phase 2: The actual financial transactions and the accounts. This part is still in the design phase and is planned to be completed by Jan. 1995 and operational in Jan 1996. Much can still be said of this phase (e.g., 2,000,000 financial transactions per day) and this will be done in a following article.

(*) KUKOBEZA is a German acronym for something like - Customers, accounts, payment-slips and payments.

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Produced in cooperation with Ada Information Clearinghouse, Ada Software Alliance, and ACM SIGAda. Hard copy available from the Ada Information Clearinghouse, at the address below.

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The views, opinions, and findings contained in this report are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as an official Agency position, policy, or decision, unless so designated by other official documentation.

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