Designing a Credit Approval System Using Web Services, BPEL, and AJAX

In the business world, financial institutions, like banks and investment firms, heavily rely on technology to manipulate daily operations and support business. Many more business processes have now become automated and require procedures to be approved. For example, when providing business services liked personal / corporate loans, mortgage, or Letter of Credit (LC), a customer is required to submit information within their applications; whereas, the service provider has to perform complicated approval procedures, involving different departments or even external parties. In this paper, we discuss how a credit approval system (CAS) handles the workflow of such business processes. The system is extensible to contemporary technologies including business process execution language (BPEL), asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), and Java server face (JSF) in order to coordinate related parties through the Internet as well as to facilitate the operations and communications with different levels of staff in the Intranet. Our experiences and design characteristics will be further implemented into a system designed for a global financial firm.

1. Introduction

Under the current globalized service economy, financial activities are essential in the everyday lives of individual investors and businesses of all sizes. In order to improve their efficiency, financial institutions are often willing to invest significantly in developing various kinds of information systems, aiming not only to save manpower, but also to reduce loss due to human error like negligence [13] [16].