Case Study

nriTouch : Social Personal Finance

Client Profile

ICICI Bank’s NRI services constantly endeavor to provide products and services that will make banking convenient for NRI customers. As a part of this commitment, they created new customer engagement initiative called "NRI Engage". Through this, customers were able to register for free online web seminars and obtain information on NRI taxation, financial planning and other topics. NRI Engage also helped customers to receive newsletters on NRI investments and avail of special seasonal offers.

Business Situation

Having narrowed down on social media as the right solution to connect NRIs, the challenge was to shortlist the social networking frameworks available and forward our recommendations to the client. The advantages of choosing a framework was that it would lead to faster time to market as the base features were readily available. The framework would also improve the user experience through frequent updates, increased stability, full source code control and less time to go live!

Solution Approach

The qualification of the framework was based on the many criteria such as scalability, stability, security and availability of pluggable modules that would be backed by a strong development community. The framework should have been deployed over at least 1000 networks and the code base would have to be completely open, with code customization option being available to the license owner.

Compassites ended up choosing Social Engine as the ideal framework since it gave us content ownership, unencrypted source code and was customizable. Social Engine had strong community support and it was built using the Zend framework. Layout changes were possible since the pages were built using blocks.

Technology Used

Social Engine and Zend framework, Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP.

Benefits & Results

Reduced bugs, security issues, reworks, writing unit test for base classes/libraries.
Standard coding practices used, so that new developers can easily pickup the code.
Provides a standardized way to structure the application.
Allows programmer to concentrate on the core application.
Sets the logical/standard flow of the application for the developers to follow.