Bermuda Monetary Authority’s Staff Personal Dealings System bases on VWG
Overview
The Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) supervises, regulates and inspects financial institutions operating in or from within the Bermuda jurisdiction. It also issues Bermuda’s national currency; manages exchange control transactions; assists other authorities in Bermuda with the detection and prevention of financial crime and advises the Government and public bodies on banking and other financial and monetary matters.
The BMA develops risk-based financial regulations that it applies to the supervision of Bermuda’s banks, trust companies, investment businesses and insurance companies. It also regulates the Bermuda Stock Exchange. In addition, and as required by the relevant financial services legislation, the Authority provides specific reports on its activities to the Minister of Finance on an annual basis. In carrying out its role, the Authority both follows and helps to set international best practice.
Business needs
A need was identified to create an internal system to meet compliance regulations that would be used to manage and keep track of all financial dealings by staff of companies registered in Bermuda.
The functionality of the system needed to include:
- Integration with the Authority’s Active Directory to provide access control and security
- Documenting all financial or interest transaction made by staff
- Auditing to check that all staff declare financial interests and holdings,
- Recording of any and all changes in these holdings made by staff
- Creating requests or permission, to deal in these entities
- Approve/Reject workflows - All transactions would need to be reviewed by a Compliance Officer who would approve, defer or reject the request via an approval workflow.
- Browser based report creation and generation
- Easy-to-use Web interface and navigation
- Support for data intensive forms
- Sub-second response times
The Solution
Following two previously successful projects using Visual WebGui, the digitalpartners.ca team knew that VWG be a perfect fit for this project.
Using VWG, the team would be able to deliver the required functionality within the tight timeframe needed by the client. This was accomplished primarily by the team being able to work in the familiar, and productive, WinForms framework as well as VWG’s proven ability to be a serious time saver during development over the old generation web development techniques.
The digitalpartners team also saw an opportunity to be able to use VWG’s award-winning Outlook Navigation component to deliver the application’s core navigation taxonomy. In under a minute, a rich Outlook experience was enabled for the application that set the overall the framework and look-and-feel of the application. Thanks to this component and much to the joy of the client, proof-of-concepts were delivered continuously throughout the development lifecycle.
Outlook tree nodes were used extensively in the solution. The populating and refreshing of the data in the trees was rendered exceptionally fast with absolutely no visible lag time, indicating that the integration of AJAX into VWG was done very well by the VWG team. Not enough can be said on how well and seamless AJAX integrates with all VWG solutions.
Flexible ad-hoc as well as canned reporting was achieved using SQL 2005 Reporting Services in Visual Studio. Report rendering and display was no problem in the VWG framework and totally met client expectations. Additional features to export report results to Excel and PDF came at no additional effort using the VWG components helping us deliver more than what the client expected.
The Outlook Navigation coupled with not having to worry about browser post-backs thanks to VWG’s built-in and transparent AJAX functionality, were probably the two most significant factors that made this project such a huge success.
"We never thought we could develop rich web applications that are so reliable, so fast and so easy", said Mike Bennett and added "We will stop developing traditional web based applications from today and have our team focus on the development of just one type of application in the future – VWG"
Benefits
As a result of the rich functionality and on-schedule delivery due to the VWG framework productivity, the Bermuda Monetary Authority is extremely satisfied with the end result and already supplying digitalpartners.ca with more projects.
The development using Visual WebGui provided unparalleled performance and reliability for the BMA, while at the same time provided the application with the rich UI needed. Moreover, VWG enabled the incorporation of a user-friendly Outlook-like navigation with minimal investment. With VWG the system is accessible from any browser and provides sub-second data responsiveness over the web.
In terms of development, VWG has no real competition for its simplicity, productivity and flexibility. As a matter of fact, "VWG is best of the Web and best of WinForms all in one package" said Mike Bennett and added that "while there still is a place in our service offering for custom WinForms applications, VWG solutions will be offered as a matter of course from now on."
Screen Shots
