That can be very helpful as they try to streamline their own business processes and institute various best financial practices. In addition to benefiting BCI's customers, the Java banking system reduces BCI's own processing costs. The bank charges its customers a fee for the software, but they pay a reduced rate for every transaction they execute using the system. We're just giving them a strong incentive to use the system. While the original application is distributed on physical media, updates are delivered electronically when customers access the bank's servers.
Security is delivered through digital signatures, encryption and passwords.
BCI's system was built by IBM using VisualAge for Java. Zanchi says Java's platform independence makes it an appealing development technology, since it will potentially let the bank migrate to other platforms. But that's not something the bank is actively considering today, since it's fairly committed to IBM's AIX platform and all of its customers are using Wintel systems. The real draw for Java, managers say, is that it offers a flexible, manageable development environment for building scalable Internet apps. From what we have seen, IBM's Java architecture will let us maintain the performance that customers require over the Internet, even as that number grows to tens of thousands of users.