The Internet may move at lightning speed, yet members still get yesterday's news when they log-in to view accounts at most online banking sites.
Look for web services to change all that.
Simply put, web services are a way to share data over the Internet using a common programming language, despite any differences in the systems where the data originated.
At Baxter Credit Union here, web services allow the CU to communicate with any participating business partner in real-time: for example, transactions are instantly posted, said Jim Block, information technology program manager at the $1.1-billion CU.
With web services, Baxter CU members can log in to home banking and see credit card and loan transactions posted up to the minute, he continued.
"Members have complimented us highly for this service, and they have no idea that the live information is pulled from a business partner a thousand miles away from the credit union," said Block.
Employees can get the same information without leaving the credit union's host system, he added.
Baxter built an Extensible Markup Language (XML) interface that requests live data from the credit card solutions provider and translates the data into user-friendly HTML at the home-banking site and host-system browser, explained Block.
Loan information is kept fresh through a similar connection to the host system, he said.
"Members used to get two-day old information, which was limited to the 128 fields the batch files could provide, as opposed to the thousands of fields made available by web services," said Block.
Most credit unions still send a daily batch file, containing thousands of transactions, which can get "messy" if it fails, Block said.
Web services will allow Baxter CU to make loan compliance easier. A service will grab compliant documents from all 50 states for a range of loan products from its loan document provider. Better yet, the provider will store and maintain all the documents, Block said.
"We'll simply make a document request for a particular loan, present the loan data, and get the currently compliant documents in one merged PDF," he said.
The document web service, due next month at Baxter, reflects "the future of the document industry," Block continued.
"It doesn't make sense for every credit union to maintain every document for every state on its own host system," he said.
Web services is only for the big players-at least for the next year or so, Block said.
"Many business partners don't provide web services yet," he explained. "Most credit union host systems don't have them either, and it's not cost-justifiable to build them. Technologically, it's pretty complex.
"However, as the host systems and business partners start offering the interfaces, we'll start seeing smaller credit unions benefit," said Block.
CUJ Resources
For info on this story:
* Baxter CU at www.bcu.org
* World Wide Web Consortium at www.w3.org/2002/ws
