Case Studies

The company is a Canada based software provider catering to financial institutions and provides a Distribution Management System via a web service that automates the workflow of wealth management, life insurance and health insurance brokerage enterprises.

The Distribution Management System application was a legacy application built in classic ASP and it lacked customization to suit the changing business needs of banks and other financial institutions and meet the new BFSI regulations. The application was not designed to support smaller/mobile screens so accessibility from portable devices like tabs/mobiles was a problem. It also lacked a built in communications module and hence all communication had to be done via email which posed a problem of potential leak of sensitive financial data.

Further, the core logic of the existing system was way too complex to be completely rewritten in a newer language without extensive testing so any potential upgrade had to be such that it would integrate seamlessly with the existing core system while also offering the advantages of a newer platform/technology. Also, any feature of the application to be rewritten had to have the ability to import data from the old system since historical data had to be maintained as per government regulations.

Rheal was chosen by the client to implement a solution which would address the above challenges. We followed a multi-pronged approach wherein the core of the application was still maintained in classic ASP while the rest of the new features were built in .net. We made only the most essential changes required to the classic application and built the rest of the new features as smaller independent modules which were self-sufficient, but at the same time were capable of interacting with the main application.

To incorporate email communication within the application itself, we built a browser based email client which had most of the features of a regular desktop mail client such as Outlook. We integrated this email client with the core of the application such that some of the mails would automatically be triggered on certain events without the user having to manually send them out. This helped the end users save a lot of time otherwise spent in email communication and also secured the entire communication process as none of the messages were sent from outside the application.

The new modules were built using HTML 5/MVC which enabled them to be used across a wide variety of portable devices without any issues.

Using Rheal’s services, the client was able to update their legacy system to conform to the latest government regulations and was also able to add much needed enhancements to the application without having to rewrite the entire application in a new language. The problem of potential information leak was also fixed with the new integrated communication module and this updated application enabled the client to target new customers and grow their business further.