The mobile banking involves the use of some mobile telecommunication devices (such phones or PDAs - Personal Digital Assistants) in order to complete, in a secure manner, banking transactions (like payments, transfers, account information and so on). It doesn't matter where the user is physically located. Also, the hour when the services are requested is not important anymore, because, thanks to the internet banking, the offices are virtually opened 24 hours per day. The ProCard system represents a suite of applications used to perform mobile banking. It was intended to be a universal solution that allows EFT, Internet and mobile banking in a single package. No special software or hardware is requiredInternet banking, mobile banking, electronic transactions, electronic funds transfer, mobile terminal, PDA, SSL, parallel processing, grid networks, clusters of workstations, grid processing.

Felician ALECU

Traian SURCEL

English

Research Papers in Economics

Informatica Economică, nr. 1 (41)/2007 
 
124 
The ProCard mobile banking system 
 
Traian SURCEL, Felician ALECU 
Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest 
 
The mobile banking involves the use of some mobile telecommunication devices (such phones or 
PDAs – Personal Digital Assistants) in order to complete, in a secure manner, banking transac-
tions (like payments, transfers, account information and so on). It doesn’t matter where the user 
is physically located. Also, the hour when the services are requested is not important anymore, 
because, thanks to the internet banking, the offices are virtually opened 24 hours per day. 
The ProCard system represents a suite of applications used to perform mobile banking. It was 
intended to be a universal solution that allows EFT, Internet and mobile banking in a single 
package. No special software or hardware is required. 
Keywords: Internet banking, mobile banking, electronic transactions, electronic funds transfer, 
mobile terminal, PDA, SSL, parallel processing, grid networks, clusters of workstations, grid 
processing..  
 
lectronic payments and mobile banking 
To
the shi
day the modern society is encouraging 
ft from the traditional methods of pay-
ment (like cash, bank transfer and so on) to the 
electronic ones (e-payment, mobile banking, 
EFT). The most popular payment methods 
available for the customers from our days are 
described below: 
a) traditional methods – like cash in advance, 
cash on delivery, bank transfers and payments 
– can be used to pay for goods purchased from 
classical stores or from e-commerce websites 
by orders placed over the Internet. In this last 
case, the payment and delivery are made in the 
conventional way, only the order is placed us-
ing the Internet; 
b) electronic methods – involve e-payment, e-
banking, mobile banking, electronic funds 
transfer, e-check, e-cash, smartcards and so on. 
The transactions are completed in a secure 
manner by using the encryption.  
Basically, an electronic payment system in-
volves the use of a digital financial instrument 
that allows the money exchange between the 
buyer and the seller. The most common issue 
regarding the electronic payments is the trans-
action security.  
The most important barriers in developing the 
electronic payment systems are the following: 
-  incomplete legal infrastructures regarding 
the card transactions and the lack of a frame-
work involving the fraud by using stolen or 
lost credit cards; 
-  underdevelopment of the credit card indus-
try in some countries; 
-  the existence of the explicit consent – a 
transaction cannot be considered as being valid 
until the owner of the credit card is physically 
signing on a specific receipt; 
-  the cash payments are preserving the ano-
nymity, while the electronic payment systems 
not. 
The major players of a successful e-commerce 
business are the following: 
-  seller – it should have a website with spe-
cific capabilities and an Intranet network to be 
used to quickly process the orders; 
-  customers – consumers having Internet ac-
cess and owning credit cards to be used for 
payments. These customers should accept the 
idea of buying an item by seeing its pictures 
and reading about its features but without ac-
tually inspecting it; 
-  transaction partners – financial institutions 
that are able to process electronic funds trans-
fers and the credit card payments; 
-  international express, overland transport and 
air freight companies – are moving physical 
items form the seller to the buyer; 
-  authentication authorities – they guarantee 
the security and the integrity of the transac-
tions; 
-  government – it provides the legal frame-
work for the e-commerce activities and also it 
protects the customers from fraud; 
-  Internet connection – reliable infrastructure 
E Informatica Economică, nr. 1 (41)/2007 
 
125
and access packages not based on the time 
spent or on the traffic performed. 
The ProCard application is a mobile system 
designed and created to process the electronic 
funds transfer transactions. The system is able 
to support Internet and mobile operations gen-
erated by using classical or mobile devices. 
For the Internet banking, a customer needs an 
Internet connection, no matter if this connec-
tion is a classical one or mobile. For the mo-
bile banking, an Internet connected PDA with 
magnetic card reader should be used. Any card 
transaction is initiated using the client 
browser. 
The very quick development of the mobile de-
vices allows the banking transactions to be 
performed through mobile phones and PDAs. 
This is called mobile banking and implies the 
existence of some dedicated services.  
Security of banking transactions performed 
over the Internet becomes a huge potential 
problem. A very good method that can be used 
to protect a private network is the implementa-
tion of a firewall between Internet and Intra-
net. This firewall will filter the packets that 
transit the network according with the security 
policy defined at the system level. 
The SSL protocol allows verifying the identity 
of a WEB server based on a digital certificate 
issued by a certification authority. Secure data 
transport over the Internet is done by using en-
cryption methods. 
Today, the mobile banking is based on dedi-
cated services offered by the telecommunica-
tion operators. Some systems are using SMS 
messages exchange but others involve smart-
cards that store the details of the accounts that 
are used. The security of these transactions is 
one of the most complicated challenges that 
need to be addressed.  
The service can be requested anytime by a user 
located anywhere. Customers do not need to 
go to the bank office and also there is no need 
to access a computer having an Internet con-
nection in order to perform the banking trans-
actions. 
Other applications of mobile banking are con-
nected with different financial services like 
online brokers, online banks, wealth managers, 
stock trading and so on. 
Of course, the mobile banking has some limi-
tations. Customers cannot access accounts that 
are not assigned with their smartcards and they 
cannot pay at the supermarket by using the 
phone, for example.  
The number of user accessing the mobile 
banking is growing faster from one year to an-
other. The use of the 3G mobile networks will 
generate the development of more sophisti-
cated services involving multimedia.  
In the last years, the banks invested o lot of 
money to develop Internet banking systems. 
Now, they need to adapt to the market and to 
offer to the users mobile banking solutions in 
the shortest possible time.  
 
The ProCard system 
ProCard is intended to be a universal solution 
that implements electronic funds transfer (also 
known as EFT), no matter if the customer is 
using a mobile or a wired Internet connection. 
In order to use the application in mobile mode, 
it is enough to use a PDA (Personal Digital 
Assistant) having Internet access. The Internet 
banking approach involves only an Internet 
connection.   
The future of mobile banking will be repre-
sented by such applications that support mo-
bile, Internet banking and EFT (Electronic 
Funds Transfer) transactions in a single user 
interface. In such a way, the mobile banking 
will be able to cover all the types of applica-
tions demanded at the market level.  
Today, the EFT transactions are basically per-
formed by using a dedicated device that is able 
to read a bank card. The user enters the PIN 
code by using a secured PINPAD. The EFT 
terminals are permanently connected to the 
bank by using dedicated wired phone lines.   
By creating applications that are able to join 
online banking with EFT ones, the mobile 
banking will become very attractive for big re-
tailers (like hypermarkets and supermarkets) 
because they will not need to invest so much 
money in the infrastructure (wires, cables, 
dedicated lines and so on). The customers will 
be able to pay by the credit cards using mobile 
devices (PDAs) located at the payment points 
and connected with a dedicated bank server by 
using the Internet.  Informatica Economică, nr. 1 (41)/2007 
 
126 
All the requests by this type will be processed 
by specialized bank servers. If the expansion 
of the mobile banking will grow faster, the 
banks will have huge problems in processing 
the incoming requests generated by the mobile 
systems. The dedicated servers will need to 
complete very fast a huge number of the trans-
actions but in a secure manner. In order to 
achieve very good response times, the servers 
could dispatch the transactions in the bank 
Intranet by implementing a grid network of 
workstations. 
The card transactions should be processed as 
fast as possible. To achieve such an objective, 
the system is actually processing the transac-
tions is a parallel manner by using a grid net-
work. The use of a grid network is an eco-
nomical and convenient solution because it is 
based on existing resources (computers located 
in the Intranet of the bank) that are not 100% 
used during the day. Their idle times could be 
used to process bank transactions generated by 
the mobile devices. Once a transaction is proc-
essed by a workstation, an answer is sent back 
to the server and the mobile device will re-
ceive a message containing the result of the 
transaction processing. Also, the parallel proc-
essing of the transactions will guarantee very 
quick and accurate responses even if the num-
ber of concurrent requests has a very large 
value.  
Today, the EFT transactions are completed by 
using dedicated phone lines. A special device 
is calling the bank server and is discussing 
with it by using a predefined protocol. The av-
erage time of a transaction is around 5 sec-
onds. The maximum number of workstations 
that can be connected to the ProCard system is 
equal with 32.000. If a number of 32.000 of 
card transactions are generated in the same 
time, the ProCard system, when running at its 
full capacity, is able to complete all the re-
quests in 5 seconds. A classical system will 
need 160.000 seconds to finish (45 hour, al-
most 2 days). The parallel processing of the 
card transactions generates a huge speedup at 
the application level. 
The resources required by the application are 
presented in the next picture.  
 
Database Server  
firewall  firewall 
WEB Server 
(Internet) 
Processing 
Server 
 (Intranet) 
Intranet Workstations 
(processing elements) 
firewall 
 
The resources required by the ProCard application 
 
The components of the ProCard system are 
listed below: 
1. The application at the WEB server level – 
written in ASP (Active Server Pages), it repre-
sents the interface used by the customer in or-
der to specify the transaction details into the 
browser.  This application also includes an 
administration module that can be accessed by 
providing a special password; 
2. Processing server – this application is writ-
ten in Visual Basic .NET. It receives the trans-
action details from the WEB server and places Informatica Economică, nr. 1 (41)/2007 
 
127
all the requests into a waiting queue. The 
scheduler manages the queuing system and it 
implements the system serving discipline 
based on priorities. 
3. Processing clients – are applications run-
ning on the workstations and, speaking in 
terms of queuing theory, they represent the 
service facility units. These clients are proc-
essing the card transactions coming from 
Internet and the results are sent back to the 
server and finally to the browser. More than 
one client is allowed to run on each work-
station.   
4. Database application – allows performing 
queries and updates in a graphical form fo-
cused on the non-initiated users. 
 
Conclusions 
Grid networks represent a distinctive and very 
modern field of the parallel and distributed 
processing. Excluding some limitations, the 
grid processing offers huge opportunities to 
exploit the parallelism. For this reason, in the 
last years a lot of applications of waiting 
queues in grid processing were developed. The 
parallel processing of bank transactions done 
by using credit cards is performed with the 
help of a grid network. The complete imple-
mentation of Internet and Mobile Banking al-
lows to the individual users to access the Pro-
Card system. Another possibility is to connect 
a few systems together in a transactional net-
work that will cause faster response times and 
better characteristics. I can conclude that grid 
processing can definitively contribute to the 
expansion of the mobile banking. 
 
References 
[1] Tanenbaum A. S., Computer Networks, 
Prentice Hall, 1996 
[2] Surcel T., Mârşanu R., Pocatilu P., Reveiu 
A., Bologa R., Alecu F., WEB Technologies 
and Databases, Tribuna Economică, 2005 
[3] Brewer M., Internet Banking: Strategies, 
Tools, and Best Practices, Sheshunoff & Co, 
2000 
[4] Chapman G., Internet Banking and Shop-
ping, Bernard Babani Publishing, 2004 
[5] Noonan W., Dubrawsky I., Firewall Fun-
damentals, Cisco Press, 2006 
[6] Cheswick R., Bellovin S., Firewalls and 
Internet Security, Addison-Wesley Profes-
sional, 2004 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The ProCard mobile banking system

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