Citibank Expedites International Fund with TeleUSE

In the banking world, most requests for international fund transfers are handled automatically, but some must be reviewed carefully by humans. When Citibank moved a subset of its international fund transfers business to an X windows environment, it wanted to simplify this often laborious process for its operators while, at the same time, increase the speed and efficiency of its Funds Transfer Network (FTN). The answer, when migrating to UNIX, was to install an object-oriented graphical user interface on the system that provides various levels of increasingly detailed information and the ability to maintain and upgrade the new application with less effort than it takes with X calls in C.

Citibank, America's largest bank in total assets, enjoys the largest global presence of any bank, with offices in 93 countries. Internal systems that facilitate the average 80,000 electronic fund transfers Citibank processes everyday for banks and large corporations are critical to Citibank's success. Companies in different parts of the world typically pay one another through their local banks, which, in turn, work through American banks, since payments are often made in U.S. dollars.

These transactions translate into "messages" in Citibank's Global Cash Management Systems/Funds Transfer Network (FTN). Citibank's "approvals" function of the FTN was developed in the late 70s using DEC PDPs and was later moved to VAXes. Five "repair operators" working on approvals review queues of messages, one at a time, on large VT100 or 200 ASCII screens.

Operators consider factors such as the availability and locations of funds within Citibank for a particular transaction request and special requests by various institutions. For instance, if a certain bank with an insufficient funds message has a policy of not borrowing money overnight, generally receives most fund transfers in the morning, and therefore wishes to have their requests answered in the afternoons, the operator takes that into account in making decisions.

In the late 1980s, as cheaper processing power became available, Citibank launched a search for tools to port the FTN to workstations. According to Gregory Parkinson, vice president of the Advanced Technology Group of Citibank's Global Cash Management Systems/Funds Transfer Network division, they wanted ease of maintenance and flexibility in deployment of mapping applications across a number of workstations and the ability to scale the FTN program at finer increments. It was also appealing to add workstations instead of an expensive VAX as their needs grew.

"An additional benefit to moving to UNIX," Parkinson reports, "was the availability of good quality tools to develop user interfaces, and it became quite clear to us we did not want to write raw X/Windows Motif code. After reviewing various tools, we selected TeleUSE because 1) It was real (unlike some of the other 'announced' products in 1990), and 2) It worked. Even at first glance, TeleUSE appeared to be an even better solution than I thought I could have."

The Citibank team identified a pilot program—a subset of the transactions that do not need modification but must be approved by a human. When the team analyzed the situation, they noted that operators use assorted transactions techniques at various times of the day to solve their problems. Closing times are critical to the banking business, when payments are made, for example, through different payment systems at different times of the day, and the process is further complicated by the various time zones.

Prototyping was a critical phase for the complicated application, and according to Parkinson, TeleUSE offers a D language that made a potentially time-consuming and painful process smooth and fast. The developers of the program were able to build screens and string them together in a mock-up of the functionality chain. Once they saw what happened with the program, they could make changes right away and immediately see the effects of those changes.

Additionally, operators did not have the ability to sort messages, so the system was not as efficient as it might have been. For example, the system might have several "insufficient funds" funds transfer messages at the same time—yet was able to handle only one request at a time on a "first come, first served" basis. The flat display was not flexible enough for the group's needs. TeleUSE gave Citibank the flexibility to rapidly prototype the system, make changes and ultimately use the screens in the final application (the actual system). The new system made it possible to make all decisions for all transactions at the same time.

Through its analysis, the team recognized that the data had to be viewed in a variety of different ways not possible with the older technology and that X/Windows, widget-based graphics terminals would make this possible. Development took one year since the UNIX system had to be in place, including research for new tools and training to conform to strict regulations, before development began. According to Parkinson, TeleUSE SPARCStations running SunOS were selected.

In the open systems version of this subset of the FTN, information on institutions is made available in a variety of different forms with varying levels of detail. Many of the views provide the same functions—a benefit of the object-oriented features of TeleUSE. To create an interface that provides the same functionality from a lot of different views, it was important that the functionality look and behave the same in each view. TeleUSE templates make that much easier for developers. Also, because they can inherit functionality from the TeleUSE templates, developers save a lot of time by modifying the basic template form and carrying it through to where the new one will be used.

With this capability in place, the fund transfer requests are reviewed, evaluated and processed based on this information. Now windows exist for each level of summarization and operators can select one part and expand on it, as needed. Summaries of transactions for individual banks are available, for instance, and it is also possible to view a full transaction.

Now two repair operators handle the workload that five handled previously, and when one of the two operators is on vacation, it is possible for one to handle the workload.

"What we got with TeleUSE was the ability to interactively create different windows and the graphic interface to show exactly what we were doing and lay it out exactly as we wanted it. It was attractive and functional," said Parkinson.

The group's future plans include the design and implementation of a full repair station so all messages (not just the approval part of the pilot program) that require human touch will be workstation-based. TeleUSE will be an important part of that development.