Success Stories - Banker's Bank of the West Opt Blue

Situation

Banker’s Bank of the West operates as a correspondent bank offering various services to local banks.
Its Bank Card business offers services related to Debit Card Processing, Merchant Services, Payment Processing, and Credit Card Offerings.
BBW had software applications supporting these Bank Card services.
BBW received data in various flat file formats from a 3rdparty financial services data provider. These file formats were not structured for easy programmatic use and required odd and error-prone text parsing routines.
When the provider modified a file format it caused a significant business disruption.
BBW was to begin supporting a new credit card issuer, which would involve modifying some of the existing software.
BBW wanted to evaluate migrating existing software to retrieve data from an API solution newly available from the 3rdparty data provider.

BW engaged Brainspire to:
- Research the API offering from the 3rdparty data provider.
- Identify API endpoints that could retrieve necessary data and provide an equivalent result to existing flat files.
- Modify the source code of the existing applications and replace the flat file upload and parsing with data retrieved from the API.
While investigating, the Brainspire team identified a performance limitation with the 3rdparty API provider. The applications required transaction data to be aggregated in monthly timeframes.
A solution was necessary to receive the individual transaction data.
The team developed a solution by creating a background service that performs the API requests to retrieve much smaller sets of data daily.
The team also created an API service layer to provide accessible endpoints that perform data retrieval and the necessary aggregations, then formats the result into the required data structures.
These components were built using ASP.NET Core 3.1

The decision to utilize the API with a well-defined database schema removed reliance on the complex file parsing logic.
This change removed a significant source of errors and program crashes.
Because the data is retrieved throughout the month and stored in BBW’s own database, the client performance is significantly faster.
Other existing applications, as well as future applications, now have access to the data store and API layer. This opens up other possibilities for BBW to use this data for other valuable purposes