Electronic Funds Transfer Network (EFTN)

 Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) is a system of transferring money from one bank account directly to another without any paper money changing hands. One of the most widely-used EFT programs is Direct Deposit, in which payroll is deposited straight into an employee's bank account, although EFT refers to any transfer of funds initiated through an electronic terminal, including credit card, ATM, Fedwire and point-of-sale (POS) transactions. It is used for both credit transfers, such as payroll payments, and for debit transfers, such as mortgage payments.

BEFTN facilitates the transmission of payments between the banks electronically, which makes it faster and efficient means of inter-bank clearing over the existing paper-based system i.e. BACPS. It is able to handle a wide variety of credit transfers such as payroll, foreign and domestic remittances, social security, company dividends, retirement, expense reimbursement, bill payments, corporate payments, government tax payments, social security payments and person to person payments. The system could handle debit transfers such as mortgage payments, loan payments, insurance premiums, utility bill payments, government tax payments, government licenses and fees.

Business continuity planning

 The Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is an essential part of any organisation’s response planning. It sets out how the business will operate following an incident and how it expects to return to ‘business as usual’ in the quickest possible time afterwards.

Business continuity planning involves developing a practical plan for how your business can prepare for, and continue to operate after an incident or crisis. A business continuity plan will help you to:

          identify and prevent risks where possible

          prepare for risks that you can't control

          respond and recover if a risk (e.g. an incident or crisis) occurs.

 

National Payment Switch Bangladesh (NPSB)

 The Bangladesh Bank has introduced National Payment Switch Bangladesh (NPSB) in order to facilitate interbank electronic payments originating from different channels like Automated Teller Machines (ATM), Point of Sales (POS), Internet, Mobile Devices etc. The main objective of NPSB is to create a common electronic platform for the switches in Bangladesh. NPSB is a mother switch of of all other switches in the country. NPSB will facilitate the expansion of the card based payment networks substantially and promote e-commerce throughout the country. Online payment of Government dues, using cards and account number information through Internet will greatly be enhanced using NPSB. Payment Systems Department (PSD) is concerned to operate and settle the transactions regularly.

Data Center, Data Warehouse, Disaster Recovery Site

 Data Center:

A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning, fire suppression) and various security devices.

Data Warehouse:

A data warehouse is a central repository for all or significant parts of the data that an enterprise's various business systems collect.Typically, a data warehouse is housed on an enterprise mainframe server. Data from various online transaction processing (OLTP) applications and other sources is selectively extracted and organized on the data warehouse database for use by analytical applications and user queries. Data warehousing emphasizes the capture of data from diverse sources for useful analysis and access.

Disaster Recovery Site:

Disaster recovery (DR) involves a set of policies and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery focuses on the IT or technology systems supporting critical business functions, as opposed to business continuity, which involves keeping all essential aspects of a business functioning despite significant disruptive events. Disaster recovery is therefore a subset of business continuity.

Database Management System

 Database Management System:

 Stands for "Database Management System." In short, a DBMS is a database program. Technically speaking, it is a software system that uses a standard method of cataloging, retrieving, and running queries on data. The DBMS manages incoming data, organizes it, and provides ways for the data to be modified or extracted by users or other programs.

Some DBMS examples include MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Access, SQL Server, FileMaker, Oracle, RDBMS, dBASE, Clipper, and FoxPro. Since there are so many database management systems available, it is important for there to be a way for them to communicate with each other. For this reason, most database software comes with an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) driver that allows the database to integrate with other databases. For example, common SQL statements such as SELECT and INSERT are translated from a program's proprietary syntax into a syntax other databases can understand.

A database management system (DBMS) is a software package designed to define, manipulate, retrieve and manage data

in a database. A DBMS generally manipulates the data itself, the data format, field names, record structure and file structure. It also defines rules to validate and manipulate this data. A DBMS relieves users of framing programs for data maintenance. Fourth-generation query languages, such as SQL, are used along with the DBMS package to interact with a database.

Parity Check , A parity bit

 A parity check is the process that ensures accurate data transmission between nodes during communication. A parity bit is appended to the original data bits to create an even or odd bit number; the number of bits with value one. The source then transmits this data via a link, and bits are checked and verified at the destination. Data is considered accurate if the number of bits (even or odd) matches the number transmitted from the source. Parity checking was created to eliminate data communication errors, is a simple method of network data verification and has an easy and understandable working mechanism.

A parity bit, or check bit is a bit added to the end of a string of binary code that indicates whether the number of bits in the string with the value one is even or odd. Parity bits are used as the simplest form of error detecting code.

There are two variants of parity bits: even parity bit and odd parity bit.

Stages of Software Development Life Cycle:

Stages of Software Development Life Cycle:

Software life cycle models describe phases of the software cycle and the order in which those phases are executed. Each phase produces deliverables required by the next phase in the life cycle. Requirements are translated into design. Code is produced according to the design which is called development phase. After coding and development the testing verifies the deliverable of the implementation phase against requirements.

There are following six phases in every Software development life cycle model:

1) Requirement gathering and analysis: Business requirements are gathered in this phase. This phase is the main focus of the project managers and stake holders. Meetings with managers, stake holders and users are held in order to determine the requirements like; Who is going to use the system? How will they use the system? What data should be input into the system? What data should be output by the system? These are general questions that get answered during a requirements gathering phase. After requirement gathering these requirements are analyzed for their validity and the possibility of incorporating the requirements in the system to be development is also studied.

Finally, a Requirement Specification document is created which serves the purpose of guideline for the next phase of the model.

2) Design: In this phase the system and software design is prepared from the requirement specifications which were studied in the first phase. System Design helps in specifying hardware and system requirements and also helps in defining overall system architecture. The system design specifications serve as input for the next phase of the model.

3) Implementation / Coding: On receiving system design documents, the work is divided in modules/ units and actual coding is started. Since, in this phase the code is produced so it is the main focus for the developer. This is the longest phase of the software development life cycle.

4) Testing : After the code is developed it is tested against the requirements to make sure that the product is actually solving the needs addressed and gathered during the requirements phase. During  this phase unit testing, integration testing, system testing, acceptance testing are done.

5) Deployment: After successful testing the product is delivered / deployed to the customer for their use.

6) Maintenance: Once when the customers starts using the developed system then the actual problems comes up and needs to be solved from time to time. This process where the care is taken for the developed product is known as maintenance.

SWIFT and its use in banks

 SWIFT stands for Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. SWIFT was founded in Brussels in 1973 under the leadership of its inaugural CEO Carl Reuterskiöld (1973–1983). It started to establish common standards for financial transactions and a shared data processing system and worldwide communications network. At present, the majority of international interbank messages use the SWIFT network.  It is a dedicated computer network that is set up to  support  fund  transfer  messages  between  member  banks  worldwide.  The majority of international interbank messages use the SWIFT network.

SWIFT transports financial messages in a highly secure way, but does not hold accounts for its members and does not perform any form of clearing or settlement.

SWIFT does not facilitate funds transfer, rather, it sends payment orders, which must be settled via correspondent accounts that the institutions have with each other. Each financial institution, to exchange banking transactions, must have a banking relationship by either being a bank or affiliating itself with one (or more) so as to enjoy those particular business features.

Banks use SWIFT to reach their counterparties, achieve operational cost efficiency, enhance their customer’s experience and improve liquidity risk management.