Case Study: Next Card

NextCard Inc is a US-based financial services company listed on NASDAQ (NXCD). They offer a range of web-based credit card products. Fintech Consultants were contracted to assist NextCard with the development of their core systems for the UK market. The internet is NextCard's only sales channel. Consequently, issues of web site performance, reliability, security and customer ease-of-use were paramount.

The project was completed to very demanding timescales in accordance with NextCard's desire to launch within only a few months of project initiation. As Brendan Lally, NextCard UK's Chief Technology Officer noted "Throughout the engagement, Fintech Consultants worked extremely hard to frequently tight deadlines. Their deep knowledge of e-commerce business and marketing issues was brought to bear on many problems during the design of the company's credit card offerings. Their understanding of the need for systems reliability was clearly visible in the implementation of the final product - it was also very scalable."

We were responsible for the design and development of a multi-tiered, highly scalable architecture for their European consumer web sites. The application was developed entirely in J2EE and was deployed on ATG Dynamo Application Server v4.5/5.0 using a combination of servlets, JSP, XML (parsed using DOM), XSL, JavaMail, RMI and JDBC 2.0. We were responsible for both the initial web-based prototype, and for "hands-on" leadership of the development team which completed the production implementation.

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The system comprises a number of real-time interfaces to third-party suppliers including Equifax for credit vetting, implemented using RMI and XML over HTTPS. Further real-time links to payment processors were developed for card balance settlement. Database services were provided by a specially developed performance-tuned interface to Oracle dataserver. For real-time dynamic content generation for emails and web pages, Fintech Consultants developed reusable XML/XSL services. This enabled presentation changes to be executed simply by adapting a set of XSL stylesheets - yielding a significant improvement in turnaround time. Application security was a major business concern and demanded significant use of RSA public key cryptography.

The web sites make extensive use of bespoke Dynamo Servlets and JSP interfaced into Nucleus components designed specially for the project. We were also responsible for extending the ATG Dynamo product by developing servlet pipeline components which enabled site visitors to be led seamlessly to the correct site "experience" based on a number of configurable criteria (eg the source banner advert or URL link). Selection of the experience was determined by a set of Nucleus components which managed site navigation from caches refreshed from Oracle 8i via JDBC.

A key part of our role was to architect and develop the system for optimum performance under heavy consumer load. This involved a full implementation of ATG Dynamo load balancing and simulation of thousands of concurrent users using tools specifically developed for the task.

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