Goldleaf Financial Solutions

Solution Provider for Banks Creates Web-Based Check Deposit Solution in Six Months

Financial institutions are always looking for products and services that will help them reduce costs, increase deposits, and secure customer relationships. Goldleaf Financial Solutions—a company specializing in payment-processing solutions for financial institutions—wanted to develop a visually rich, easy-to-use Web-based application that banks could offer to consumers and small businesses who want to make check deposits through scanners in their home or office. Using a variety of Microsoft® products and technologies, including the Microsoft Silverlight™ browser plug-in, Goldleaf quickly and efficiently created its Sierra Xpedite Retail Remote Deposit solution. This visually rich and easy-to-use application provides banks with a compelling and useful offering with which to attract new customers and boost their business.

Situation

Goldleaf Financial Solutions, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, provides payment-processing solutions and technology to financial institutions around the world. The company’s products and services include branch deposit automation, remote deposit, check processing and imaging, and other commercial payment solutions that are used by banks and other financial services organizations.

Microsoft Silverlight gave us the tools we needed to build a rich, Web-based application that is good to look at and simple to use for depositing checks from the home or the office.  William Randlett Senior Vice President of Product Development for Enterprise Payments Goldleaf Financial Solutions

One core market for Goldleaf is enterprise deposit automation solutions that help financial institutions convert paper-based transaction processes to electronic, image-enabled processes. These solutions help financial institutions reduce costs, improve efficiencies, and achieve higher customer satisfaction due to faster acceptance and processing of payments and deposits. The software applications made by Goldleaf are mission critical, acting as the gateway for payment and deposit acceptance across a variety of service channels, including bank branches, ATMs, Web applications, and other front- and back-office payment applications.

Goldleaf management wanted to extend its solution offerings to provide consumers and small businesses with a way to make check deposits conveniently from their homes or offices using scanners they already own. William Randlett, Senior Vice President of Product Development for Goldleaf Enterprise Payments, says the company saw a market opportunity stemming from the convergence of several factors.

“First, the increasingly widespread use of flatbed and multifunction scanners by consumers provides a low-cost way for people to scan their checks,” says Randlett. “And, with the general acceptance of online banking, a lot of banks, including our largest customers, are looking for ways to reach a wider customer base with more Web-based, self-service offerings. Allowing people to scan a check from their home or office and upload it online to a checking account, instead of having to go to a bank branch or ATM, is an ideal solution because of the convenience it provides to the customer while simultaneously reducing customer servicing and processing costs.”

Goldleaf wanted to provide a complete solution that financial institutions could offer to their retail customers for making check deposits online. For the solution to succeed, however, Goldleaf would need to address several key requirements, including ease of use and rich graphics to make interactions pleasant for consumers, scalability to support deployments by some of the world’s largest financial institutions, security, and operational features that could handle scenarios such as network connections that are lost in the middle of transactions.

Solution

Goldleaf considered several development platforms, including Java, for creating its new solution, but decided to use Microsoft products and technologies to build the new check deposit solution, which it calls Sierra Xpedite Retail Remote Deposit. The solution was developed with help from Wintellect, another Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

The products and technologies used included:

• The Microsoft Silverlight™ browser plug-in, which works with several popular browsers on both the Windows® and Mac OS X operating systems to deliver rich, interactive applications for the Web.
• The Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 development system.
• Microsoft Expression Blend™ design software, which was used to create the graphical user interface for the solution.
• Microsoft Expression® Design, which was used extensively for graphics design.
• Microsoft Expression Media Encoder, which provides built-in Silverlight media player templates for a variety of media, including videos, and provided the development teams with a way of embedding short video tutorials in the Sierra Xpedite Retail Remote Deposit solution.
• Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5, a managed-code programming environment used for building applications on Windows-based client computers, servers, and mobile or embedded devices.
• Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 data management software, which is used for handling customers’ image files.

With Silverlight and the other Microsoft development tools, each step of integrating the software code and user design took just hours, instead of the days it would have taken using another development environment.  Steve Porter Project Manager and Lead Developer Wintellect

Additionally, the Retail Remote Deposit solution was integrated with the Goldleaf Payment Web Service and the Sierra Xpedite image deposit processing foundation, both of which were designed using the Microsoft .NET Framework.

The teams began development work on the new Sierra Xpedite solution in mid-2008, taking about six months to create the product before making it available to banks in February 2009. “The development work went very smoothly,” says Randlett. “Silverlight was new to us, so we were a little concerned at first about training our developers on it. But the training took just two days to make our team ready to begin work on the project.”

Benefits

In only six months, Goldleaf designed and delivered a feature rich, easy-to-use Web-based application that financial institutions can use to reduce costs, attract new customers and retain existing ones. Using Microsoft products and technologies, Goldleaf was able to create the solution twice as fast as it would have using other development environments. The company also avoided significant development and support costs. The visually rich solution is an easy-to-use, compelling offering for consumers and small businesses that can save them time and money by avoiding trips to the bank. Financial institutions also benefit from the solution by being able to offer a service that helps extend their geographical reach with minimal technical support and IT overhead.

Development Twice as Fast Than Using Other Tools

By using Microsoft development products and technologies, most notably Silverlight, the Goldleaf and Wintellect design and development teams built a feature-rich, yet easy-to-use Web-based application faster and more efficiently than if they had used competitive development environments.

“We considered Java, but felt that Silverlight and the other Microsoft development tools would help us get the solution to market faster,” says Randlett. “That was an accurate assumption. By using Silverlight, we estimate that we completed the solution about 50 percent faster than if we had used any of the competing development environments.”

The company credits its accelerated development speed and efficiency to a number of different features in the Microsoft tools, such as those that facilitate faster, more efficient debugging of code. Additionally, Silverlight application code is completely decoupled from the design files. Because of this decoupled framework, the developers and designers on the project were able to work in parallel, and then easily merge their work upon completion.

“This [decoupling] delivered some big benefits to the project in terms of time and money saved,” says Steve Porter, the Wintellect Project Manager and Lead Developer for the solution. “Our designers could work on their wireframes to determine the look of the user interface at the same time that developers were working on the code. With Silverlight and the other Microsoft development tools, each step of integrating the software code and user design took just hours, instead of the days it would have taken using another development environment.”

Visually Compelling, Convenient Solution

With Silverlight, Goldleaf and Wintellect were able to create a solution designed to appeal to consumers and small businesses that want a convenient way of making deposits online and avoiding trips to the bank.

We considered Java, but felt that Silverlight and the other Microsoft development tools would help us get the solution to market faster.  William Randlett Senior Vice President of Product Development for Enterprise Payments Goldleaf Financial Solutions

“The key to making this a success for financial institutions—and their customers—is that it had to be a rich, interactive application that is easy-to-use and appealing from the first moment a consumer looks at it,” says Randlett. “Microsoft Silverlight gave us the tools we needed to build a rich, Web-based application that is good to look at and simple to use for depositing checks from the home or the office. When people are making deposits, they don’t want to be faced with complex software.”

Sierra Xpedite Retail Remote Deposit provides users with an interface that they can navigate quickly. To enhance the user experience and encourage use and adoption of the solution, the development teams used Expression Media Encoder to embed small video Help files that show how to use the flatbed scanner to scan a check.

The solution is also designed with mission-critical scalability and reliability to meet the needs of some of the world’s largest financial institutions for a fast, stable network experience during transactions. For example, if a network connection is interrupted during an image upload, the image file and consumer information is stored in memory. Then the transaction is completed when a connection is restored. This eliminates the need for consumers to repeat procedures or sit by their computers waiting for a new connection. As a security feature, once a scanned image is uploaded, the image file disappears from memory.

Attractive Offering That Can Help Banks Win Customer Business

Retail banking is an extremely competitive industry, so financial institutions need to continually offer innovative products and services that are both intuitive for customers to use and cost effective for the financial institution. By using Silverlight and other Microsoft products to develop its Sierra Xpedite Retail Remote Deposit solution, Goldleaf can now provide banks with a high-value, low-maintenance offering that lets consumers and small businesses make check deposits from the convenience of their home or office.

“Part of the attraction of this solution is that it doesn’t require much in the way of IT resources or maintenance on the part of banks,” says Randlett. “The Microsoft tools and Web-based environment allow for easy, quick changes and modifications without any significant impact on users. The solution can also be fully branded and integrated with online banking and portal sites that are already familiar to users, thereby leveraging the financial institutions’ investments in existing systems.”

Goldleaf, as a leader in branch deposit automation, remote deposit, check processing, and other payment solutions, has extensive knowledge of the risks, security requirements, and compliance considerations that are associated with Web-based banking. What Goldleaf needed was the right development and design tools to create a solution that financial institutions will adopt.

“To stay competitive in this market, we believe that financial institutions need to offer a scalable remote-deposit solution that is easy for consumers and small businesses to use, and easy for the banks to manage on the back end,” Randlett says. “Sierra Xpedite Retail Remote Deposit may be particularly attractive to institutions with a geographically diverse customer base, or those with a strategic focus on expanding beyond their existing geographical footprint.

“Silverlight and the Microsoft toolset allowed us to bring to market a rich, interactive Web application that will allow financial institutions to compete more effectively and to deliver better service to their customers,” Randlett concludes.

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/

For more information about Wintellect products and services, call (877) 968-5528 or visit the Web site at:
http://www.wintellect.com/

For more information about Goldleaf Financial Solutions products and services, call (678) 966-0844 or visit the Web site at:
www.goldleaf.com/enterprisepayments

Microsoft Expression

For more information about Microsoft Expression please visit:
www.microsoft.com/expression

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published February 2009