Financial Services Company Realizes Transactional Deadline with SMBology’s Technical Management & Configuration Abilities

Company Overview

SMBology’s client is a financial services company serving consumers who want a convenient way to access cash, pay bills, cash checks, obtain prepaid debit cards and perform a variety of other day-to-day transactions. The firm’s network of ATMs and kiosks are deployed in thousands of retail locations and tax preparer offices across the U.S. and process hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions each year, including peak volume during Q1 of each year that has close to a quarter of a billion dollars of transactions being processed in a four week period with approximately 500 ATMs spread across the country.

Business Challenge

The financial services company acquired their transaction processing system, Cashworks, from GE in early 2008. This incredibly sophisticated back-end system is responsible for processing over $300 million in transactions each year, most of it within a single eight week period. In addition to attaining the software system itself, the firm also acquired the operating environment, consisting of approximately 20 servers, each with elaborate configuration settings. The system was delivered with very limited documentation. More importantly, it needed to be set up in a secure data center, understood and prepared for running reliably within six months. The deadline was immovable: $250 million of transactions were scheduled to be run through the system starting on January 15th and the schedule could not be changed.

SMBology Solution

SMBology organized and led the entire setup and verification process for the Cashworks system. First, the system documentation was reviewed. While significantly limited, sufficient background information was provided to commence the project. Secondly, SMBology travelled to the new data center to inventory and physically inspect the firm’s equipment. After planning and documenting the proposed system architecture, SMBology worked with the company’s data center over a three month period to configure the necessary connections and facilitate setup. This included coordination with third party vendors for connectivity.

During this time, SMBology was able to successfully lead the financial services firm through numerous challenges encountered in this portion of the project. For example, a third party vendor was necessary to convert terminal dial-up requests into transactions that could be sent into the system. However, this vendor was not able to successfully connect to the Cashworks system. SMBology led the process to resolve the issue. It was determined that certain core hardware was missing from the data center (specialized modems that had not been shipped from one data center to the other). Additionally, software to control those modems had been incorrectly configured on the machines. SMBology acquired the modems, configured the software, and then coordinated with the vendor to hook their pieces into the system-- all within very tight deadlines. If any deadlines had been missed, the system would not have been able to be operational by January 15th and over $250 million in transactions could not have been processed.

In parallel with these efforts, SMBology reviewed and provided source code. A development environment was set up to verify that the supplied source code would “build” into a final software system that could be redeployed to the production environment. In essence, this was done to verify that SMBology had the raw building blocks to be able to modify the software, and if necessary, to add new features or functionality to the existing system.

After completing the above steps, SMBology worked with the various vendors and banks to fully test prior to going live.

Results

SMBology utilized its project management skills and technical consulting abilities to assess the firm’s existing system architecture, provide recommendations, and properly configure and implement the best solution for the company’s acquired Cashworks system. The project was successfully completed prior to the company’s unyielding deadline, allowing for all transactions to be processed on January 15th.