DAH SING BANK considers itself an innovator and early adopter of technology in Asia, and has an impressive record, according to Ricky Wong, the bank's e-commerce development manager.
'It's a little known fact that we were the first bank in Hong Kong to offer internet banking to our corporate customers back in March 2000,' Mr Wong said. 'We started to offer online services to our retail customers then, although it was not a full featured internet banking system, but an EBPP [electronic bill payment and presentation] system,' he said.
At that time, the system used EPS (easy payment system) to connect to a PPS (phone payment system). However simple it may have been, it was a start.
Over the years, the bank has looked at a lot of technologies, and Web services was something Dah Sing thought could be useful. Many factors went into deciding how it would design its system.
The bank looked at Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP), Java and a number of other technologies. In the end, the J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition] platform presented the best choice, Mr Wong said. Dah Sing Bank built its e-banking and i-securities services on BEA's WebLogic Application Server, running on Sun's Solaris operating system with an Oracle database.
'Performance, always a problem in projects of this kind, was not an issue,' Mr Wong said.