Page 7 - Eurogiro News-sept_2011_web

Eurogiro News 7

Technical User Group meeting 2011 in Copenhagen

This year we have seen the greatest number of participants in the Eurogiro Technical User Group meeting since the Group was formed. We are proud to provide members with up-to-date technical information about our products, hold interesting workshops and discuss what is happening in the market.

A good reason for having the Technical User Group meeting in Copenhagen is that it is the home of Eurogiro and the Eurogiro Network Operation Centre, ENOC. The support team at ENOC is in daily contact with many of the members, and to be able to bring the entire ENOC team together to meet with our members is valuable for both our members and for Eurogiro.

It also gave the participants an opportunity to visit the ENOC Centre in Copenhagen.

On the agenda were many interesting presentations from members and partners. Three of these were Mobile Technology, Cloud Computing and Open Source.

Mobile Technology in daily banking

Mobile Technology - How do we use it? What do we gain? These are questions that all banks and postal organisations have been asking themselves.

‘Smartphones’ are about to dominate the mobile market with their Mobile Apps. With these we see new ways of carry-ing out daily tasks in relation to banking, such as paying bills, sending transactions or checking account statements, all from a smartphone. This brings value to the end-user, which also brings value to the respective financial organisations.

The development of Mobile Apps for finan-cial services, such as internet banking, requires a great deal of thought and plan-ning. Various stakeholders with different backgrounds need to be involved in the project at an early stage.

In many cases agile development has proven to be a perfect approach to keep innovation flowing throughout the entire project. An agile project never prevents the participants from providing and implemen- ting new ideas and innovation to the project throughout its lifetime. Since a project like this is so dependent on the acceptance from the end-users there is a need to add functionalities as they arise, explains Anne Sofie Bille, Trifork A/S.

Further she explains, Mobile Apps are quite different when comparing them to ordinary software being developed in a financial world. End-users have acceptance for updates and new functionality to a Mobile App. However, the difficult part is

ensuring that the server controlling all queries from the mobile app has the full functionality from day 1 in order to operate properly. Updates to the server are in many cases connected to a risk of downtime and unavailability of services, which should be avoided.

Cloud Computing explained

Per Andersen, Cap Gemini, explained that Cloud Computing is a way of providing soft-ware, storage, data access and computing power in a service form. It does not require end-user knowledge of the configuration or its physical location.

It is also a way of increasing the need for capacity or computing resources as they arise, in real-time over the internet, without investing in new software, infrastructure or hardware, or even new personnel.

How does the concept of Cloud Computing fit in to a financial organisation? The key question which is discussed in numerous de-bates today is security. Is the Cloud concept secure enough to be used by a bank, which

This year’s Technical User Group meeting was once again held in Copenhagen. Many interesting presentations were given by members and partners on topics such as Mobile Technology, Cloud Computing and Open Source, focusing on how to ft these into the daily operations of a fnancial organisation

Trifork A/S has developed the mobile app for Sydbank A/S and as such was invited to present the agile model they used in this project.

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In this year’s workshop the participants were supposed to give advice to Atlantis Postbank how to design and implement a mobile platform, and connect this to an already existing payment platform. Fabrizio Raveggi, Poste Italiane present-ed his group’s results

Key points to make the Mobile App project a success story!

> Defne your business goals > Set up a workshop > Spend time and money on prototyping

> Know your in-house competencies > Allocate the right resources (internal/external)

> Assemble a GREAT team of business, design and technical people

> Innovation demands a high level of agility

> Fixed price contracts do not work > Develop smaller parts of functionality and release often > Listen to user demands