Skyline - Retail Deposit Tracking

It's been some time since a news update on Boomerang - in the past month we have been working on several new ideas. The most compelling is solving a long standing mystery in the banking industry. One significant business for a bank is supporting a retail customer - such as your local grocery store or the Home Depot. These customers need to deposit large amounts of cash and checks during the course of the business day. These deposits are usually picked up by an armored carrier such as Brinks or AT Systems, and carried to a central deposit processing center where the bags of money are opened, counted and credited to the merchant's account. This has been going on for decades and generally works fairly well.

One of the business patterns that crop up (and usually end up getting us involved) is that long standing patterns become less acceptable as customer expectations change. In this case there was a surprising lack of information about the status of these deposits as they were transported and processed. The customers were asking, rightly so, I can send a pencil to our offices in Tampa and know within a minute or so every step it takes along the route via Fedex, why is it my $200,000.00 deposit can't have the same?

Enter a new system we have given the working name Skyline. Content based integration is all about being able to transform enterprise data and raw resources into tagged and attributed content in XML and RSS. This content can be syndicated to multiple consumers, including other applications, where it can be combined with other content and used to create a composite application. In this case we are building Feedlets (tiny content producing engines) on top of the transport systems for the armored carriers, then syndicating the deposit transport status to the banks. The banks can fetch this information via a secure channel (these are high value bank deposits after all!). Inside the deposit processing center, other Feedlets tap into the data from the systems that track the deposit bags in the vault and monitor each stage of the deposit processing workflow. The end result is merged (Mashed up in the classical term) to produce web content that is viewed through the bank's customer facing portal.


Suddenly, the bank's customers have Fedex style tracking of their deposits from the time they are picked up by the armored car to the time they are processed and credited. It all shows up transparently in the bank's portal, and the net result is the customers are happier and the bank's customer service team has a significant reduction in calls from retailers wanting to know where their bags of money for deposit are.

Like all good Boomerang applications, there are multiple ways that the content can be combined and correlated - and we end up with multiple views of this information. Below is a screen shot of the "command center" application that the bank's product managers can use to monitor the entire deposit system at a enterprise, regional and district level.