MobileFinance (MF)-- A Component Based Approach to Financial Services

Transcription

1 MobileFinance (MF)-- A Component Based Approach to Financial Services Andres Gonzalez, Navneet Bhartia, Daniela Mehandjiska-Stavreva School of Information Technology, Bond University, Australia andres_gonzalez2001@yahoo.com, navneet@post.com Abstract The purpose of this paper is to define an architecture integrating financial systems with mobile users. The paper explores the current technologies available, key issues, advantages and disadvantages of the technology. A financial framework has been implemented using the Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standards from Sun Microsystems. Components have been deployed so they can be reused by financial companies in a different scenario with minimum changes. 1. Introduction The present form of the Web is based upon a client/server architecture. The dialogue between a client and a Web server is always initiated by the client. The server is not able to take the initiative because if the server contacts the client first, there is no software resident on the client that understands the server or a respond in kind. Peer computing replaces the asymmetric client/server relationship with a symmetric one in which all peers are simultaneously client and server requesting service of, and providing service to, their network peers [4]. Peer to peer computing supports a class of applications that takes advantage of resources available at the edges of the Internet [5]. Because accessing decentralized resources means operating in an environment of unstable connectivity and unpredictable IP addresses, peer to peer nodes must have significant or total autonomy from central servers. Message oriented middleware (MOM) is a specific class of middleware that operates on the principles of message passing or message queuing [6]. Existing mobile applications do not utilize the advantages of message oriented middleware. In the near future, the need for mobile computing will increase and more dynamic service for mobile computing will be required, as interacting with wireless networks is becoming almost commonplace. Peer to peer communication can take advantage of MOM applications and use software components to enable communication between mobile devices and application servers. Components are independent modules with a set interface through which other components can communicate with them. However, there is a need to make these components more reusable by enabling them to be used in different environments and context. Therefore, a common framework is necessary which would provide a common environment on which these components can work. Two frameworks have been developed in recent times: Microsoft.NET [7] and J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) [8]. Both of them provide an environment on which components can be deployed. Moreover, they also provide other services like transaction management, persistence management etc. These other services are developed so that the programmer can concentrate only on the business logic of the system and leave the rest to the underlining framework. This also helps in making the components more reusable as the components are no longer dependent on the backend repository. Microsoft.NET is a proprietary product of Microsoft while J2EE is an open specification. The J2EE specification is implemented by various companies like Sun, Bea Systems, IBM. These frameworks have been designed to allow the developer to concentrate only on the business logic, letting the persistence, security, concurrency, network protocols, etc., be managed by the application server. Sun Microsystems Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is one of these frameworks. J2EE defines a standard to simplify the development of N-tier enterprise applications [1]. Whenever a new specification is released, different vendors compete for the implementation of the specification. Companies then can select an implementation that better suites their requirements.the purpose of this paper is to define an architecture integrating finantial systems with mobile users. A financial framework is implemented using the Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standards from Sun Microsystems. Components have been deployed so they can be reused

2 in a different scenario with minimum changes. The advantages of the architecture are:?? Support for the increased number of mobile applications The growth and use of mobile devices for communication is increasing at a very high rate. Financial companies are looking for better ways of reaching their customers and speeding up the process of approving a loan.?? Improved Connectivity One of the most important benefits of this proposed architecture is that in the future people will not need to be connected to a desktop computer to reach the Internet. Mobile devices and different ways of sending valuable information to other parties are emerging every day.?? Increased number of distributed applications Financial companies require integration with third party applications to verify information about a customer. These applications can be located any where in the Internet and should be accessible using welldefined standards. Interaction and communication between these applications is vital. This paper evaluates the tools and technologies currently available to develop a mobile architecture, based on the requirements of financial applications. A proposed architecture integrating financial applications with mobile users has been developed. Guidelines on hardware and software requirements have been proposed. 2. Financial application Financial components have a well-known potential market. Unfortunately, existing financial components are either very expensive or very large grain, which make them difficult to be customized. Components, which are small enough to be used by small companies, do not exist or at least they are not available at the existing component market places. Some of the existing financial components include:?? Equities and real estate WebCab: This component is built in J2EE and is useful in computation of various investment ratio like PE ratio, yield gap etc.?? Portfolio Analysis from WebCab: This component also built in J2EE is useful for analysis of risk factors of portfolios. It comp utes various measures like correlation, covariance, and indifference curve.?? FOTO by Financial Object Resources Ltd: is set of Java Components for development of investment and wholesale banking.?? TVM by Cedar Spring Software, Inc: is a time value of money component is used for solving problems with loans, mortgage, annuity by computing interest, present value, future value etc. It is a JavaBean component, which provides functionality similar to the computing module of the financial application. However, it does not have any Graphical User Interface. The financial components that have been identified have a lack of integration with mobile devices. This paper intends to develop a framework to integrate the characteristics of current financial components with the ability of mobile environments. The financial application that has been integrated with the mobile device is a loan manager application. The loan manager maintains all the loan details of a company, which is in the business of providing loan to borrowers. This system can also be extended for other services, for example renting of white goods. The decision of approving a loan includes some generic features like checking the credit rating of the borrowers, deciding on the terms of the loan (interest rate, period of loan), etc. The Loan Manager can provide information about the Credit Rating of the borrowers by using applications provided by external agencies. The financial application maintains the loan details. It consists of the following information:?? A loan has borrowers and one or two guarantors.?? Borrowers and guarantors details consist of their address and phone number.?? The loan can have various items as security. Security items are assets that the company gets the right to possess in case the borrower defaults in his payment. It can be motor vehicles, household items, jewellery, etc. The loan also has various terms like the rate of interest, number of repayments, frequency of repayment, amount of repayment, fee etc. The application has a built in calculator that calculates the interest rate, number of repayments, and amount of repayment. The system is able to check the credit rating of the borrowers and guarantors by enquiring the BayCorp system, which is an external application. In case of a motor vehicle the system is able to do a Revs check using the BayCorp system. The use case diagram for the financial calculator is shown in Figure 1.

3 <<includes>> Agent Enter Client Information Send to RentCard Client DataBase Client Define Loan Purpose and Terms Calculate Payment BayCorp Advantage RentCard Manager Check Client Credit History TICA Check Client Character History Revs Check Security <<includes>> Loan Document Document Centre Manage Document Projection Schedule Send Withdrawal Ezi Debit Bank Manage Account & Finance Figure 1. MobileFinance use case diagram. The system is composed of three users: the client, the agent, and the manager. The roles of these users are:?? Client: Client is a person who wants to take loan from the company. The client gives his personal information (address, phone number, etc.) to the agent. The client also defines the terms of the loan, i.e., how much loan he needs, the purpose of the loan, how much he can repay (weekly or monthly).?? Agent: The agents collect information from the client and feed the data as a loan request in the company's system. They do not have access to any other functions of the system.?? Manager: The manager is the manager of the company. He performs various tasks. Firstly when he gets a loan request he checks the detail of the loan and determines the interest rate. He then checks the client history with the BayCorp system, which is an external application that provides information to external clients about a particular client. He might also need to check the character history of the clients with TICA. If there is any motor vehicle as security then he also does a Revs check. If he is satisfied by these results he can approve the loan. The manager also calculates the payments, which the clients need to pay. He also maintains the documents of the clients. The system is able to perform the following tasks:?? Enter Client Information: The agent enters the information about the client. This information contains Name, Address and the phone number. The agent might also enter information such as motor vehicles details, jewellery, household items, etc.,

4 for security purposes.?? Define terms of loan: The client decides on various terms of loan like how much loan he needs, how much time he will need to pay the loan back, how frequently can he repay (weekly/monthly).?? Calculate payment: The manager is able to compute when and how much does the client have to pay. He can also check what is the balance of the client on a particular date.?? Check Client Credit History: The manager is able to check the credit history of the client. The system connects to the BayCorp site and sends an http request to a URL assigned by BayCorp. The system replies by sending an XML document containing the information about the client credit history.?? Revs Security Check: If the client has given any motor vehicle as security for the loan, the manager needs to do a Revs Security check. Revs provide information about the vehicle, its owner, if there is any one with whom the vehicle is mortgaged. This is again done through the BayCorp site.?? Check Client Character History: The manager can also check the character history of the client from TICA in the same way it does the credit check from BayCorp.?? Approve Loan: If the manager is satisfied by the terms of loan, the BayCorp information and Revs checks he may decide to approve the loan. Loan approval is essential before any money can be disbursed to the client.?? Manage Documents: The manager can produce various documents for a client like a contract, payment schedule etc. as per the given word template. The manager can also modify or add new templates to the system.?? User Authentication: The integration of financial systems and mobile applications require some way of authentication, to provide a high level of security. The application needs to ensure that the potential borrower is really who he/she claims to be. The architecture has the capability of using the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) to authenticate the client and server of a communication channel and to protect its content. Security is managed using a username/password on the mobile device. The user information will be sent to an external server using Secure Socket Layer. 3. System Architecture Mobile applications should handle only the interaction with the user and leave everything else to the server. The server-side requirements necessitate different layers that act as a bridge between the mobile application and the enterprise servers. Figure 2 shows the standard architecture for mobile applications. The mobile device sends a request to a JSP or servlet using the HTTP protocol. The JSP page or servlet in turn sends the request to the EJB Container, which can then perform the business logic. The EJB Container can interact with the Database or an External Application (such as BayCorp) depending upon the request. The EJB sends a reply to the JSP page, which in turn replies to the Mobile Device. JavaServer Pages/Servlets Enterprise JavaBeans DB HTTP Local or Remote Method calls JDBC Figure 2. Standard architecture for mobile applications. A more detailed architecture of the MobileFinance component framework is shown in figure 3.

5 The application is composed of the following components. 1. LoginApplication: As mentioned before, security is a big concern in mobile applications. This component acts as an authentication layer between the mobile application and the server. User name and password are sent and verify against the information stored in the server. The application starts a session for this user if the verification process is successful. 2. MobileApplication: Upon successful authentication from the mobile user, the user interface and options are managed completely in the mobile device, using a component that handles user options (new loan, verify loan, verify user, etc.). 3. Processing: This is the main component in the architecture. It receives all the requests from the mobile and selects the appropriate action, according of what the mobile user has selected. For instance, the component can instantiate an Enterprise JavaBean session bean, interacting with third party applications (such as BayCorp). This component can also instantiate Enterprise JavaBean Entity Bean, leaving all the transactions, database management and integrity to the Bean Container. HTTP LoginApplication MobileApplication Processing Enterprise JavaBeans Components Local or Remote Method calls HTTP/XML Session Bean JDBC Entity Bean External Applications (BayCorp Advantage) Client Database Figure 3. MobileFinance architecture

6 4. Technologies available This paper evaluates the main technologies and architectures that are currently available to develop mobile applications: 4.1. Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). J2EE defines a standard to simplify the development of N-tier enterprise applications. It is a collection of specifications that describe required APIs and policies, controlled by the Java Community Process (JCP) [9]. Whenever a new specification is released, different vendors compete for the implementation of the specification. Companies then can select an implementation that better suites their requirements. J2EE provides a very good state management service so that the developer do not have to worry about writing code to manage state. Persistence management, provided by J2EE in form of entity bean, allow user to write code without being dependent on the underlining database. Container managed transaction is another feature of J2EE which allows programmers to develop software without explicitly writing code to manage transaction. The following technologies available in the Java 2 Enterprise Edition have been identified to develop the MobileFinance architecture:?? Servlets A servlet is a Java class that is invoked in response to a user s command. Servlets reside on the web tier and typically act as the intermediary between the client tier and the business tier.?? JavaServer Pages JavaServer Pages (JSP) is a technology developed by Sun Microsystems that allows web developers to create and maintain dynamic web pages. JSP technology uses scriptles written in the Java Programming language to encapsulate the logic that generates the content for the page. JSP technology is built on top of the Servlet architecture and allows for a clear separation between presentation logic and business logic.?? Enterprise JavaBeans An enterprise bean is a server-side component that encapsulates the business logic of an application. In a financial system, the enterprise bean will be in charge of connecting to third party applications, check user authentication, provide session management, etc [1].?? Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) JDBC is an application programming interface (API) that lets developers to access a wide range of SQL databases [1]. Most Internet technologies are designed for desktop and large computers running on reliable networks with relatively high bandwidth. Hand-held wireless devices, on the other hand, have a more constrained computing environment [2]. They have less memory, less powerful CPUs, different input devices, and smaller displays. Further, wireless networks have less bandwidth and more latency compared to wired computer networks. Specifically designed for mobile devices, J2ME (Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition) is compatible with all popular operating systems. This means that a range of applications can be implemented across different networks and handsets. J2ME introduces two concepts to support a wide range of devices with limited memory: The configuration and the profile. Configurations consist of the Connected Device Configuration (CDC) and the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC). The CDC configuration runs the Java Virtual Machine (JVM ). It is normally used for devices such as set-top box, Internet screen phone, etc. The CLDC configuration is intended for devices with limited hardware capabilities, such as mobile phones, low-end personal digital assistants (PDAs), and pagers. The profile defines the application and the type of devices supported by a particular application. Profiles are built on top of configurations. Two profiles have been defined for J2ME and are built on CLDC: Kjava and Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP). MIDP is a version of the Java platform based on CLDC that is aimed at small footprint devices, principally cell phones and two-way pagers. It is also suitable for running on PDAs, and an implementation is available for PalmOS Version 3.5 and higher. MIDP applications are called MIDlets. A MIDlet is a Java application designed to run on a mobile device [3]. Applications written for the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) are rarely stand-alone applications. Normally, there's some part of the application that involves calling server-side code for processing. In MIDP 1.0, the only way to portably invoke server-side code is by making HTTP requests to a servlet running in an external Web server.

7 4.2. Microsoft.NET Recently Microsoft has come up with Microsoft.NET platform..net is not a programming language but a framework to develop applications. It supports more that two dozen programming languages including C#,C++,Visual Basic etc. With.NET the applications are not compiled to native code.instead.net uses two step compilation. First, the code is compiled into Microsoft Intermediate Language(MSIL). The Common Language Runtime(CLR) then compiles it into native code. The objective of this is to be able to develop CLR for different platforms and thus make.net applications a platform independent application. Microfoft has also included C# with.net which is very simillar to Java. Microsoft has upgraded Visual Basic 6.0 to VB.NET and included object-oriented suport in Visual Basic. However, older Visual Basic 6 code is not compatible with the newer VB.NET. Microsoft has also upgraded its ASP to ASP.NET. Microsoft has developed.net with a lot of focus on Web Services. A big advantage of.net is that developer do not have to write different code for different device like desktop, PDA, mobile. The same code can present data in different ways depending on the device. The J2EE architecture has been selected to develop the MobileFinance application because of its maturity and variety of Open Source applications existing in the current market. 5. Conclusions Sun s Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft.Net are two of the most widely technologies used to develop web and mobile applications. Sun s J2EE is based on a set of specifications that can be implemented by many vendors. One of the J2EE s major disadvantages is that the choice of the platform dictates the use of a single programming language, but it offers an advantage of operating system portability. Microsoft s.net platform is a set of products rather than specifications. The major disadvantage of this approach is that it is limited to the Windows Platform, so applications written for the.net platform can only be run on.net platforms. The J2EE architecture has been selected to develop the MobileFinance application because of its maturity and variety of Open Source applications existing in the current market. Components have been developed so they can be reused and customized with minimum changes. 6. References [1] SUN (1999). Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Retrieved June 15, 2002, from the World Wide Web: [2] SUN (1999, March 30). Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME). Retrieved June 3, 2002, from the World Wide Web: [3] Midlet.org (2002). Midlets. Retrieved June 10, 2002, from the World Wide Web: [4] Informationweek.com. New life for Peer-to-Peer Computing. Retrieved June 1, 2002, from the world wide web: [5] Informationweek.com. The Power of Peer-to-Peer. Retrieved June 4, 2002, from the world wide web. [6] Software Engineering Institute. (2000, September 22). Message Oriented Middleware. Retrieved May 2, 2002, from the World Wide Web. [7] Microsoft (2002). Microsoft.NET. Retrieved May 2, 2002, from the World Wide Web. [8] SUN (1999). Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Retrieved May 3, 2002, from the World Wide Web. [9] JCP (2001). Java Community Process. Retrieved February 2,2002, from the World Wide Web: