Preprocessed Online Banking Transaction Technique: An Effective Measure for Avoiding Long Queues at Banks and ATMs

Abstract

Online bank transactions such as those carried out using Automated Teller Machines ATMs have benefitted much from the concept of computer networks with centralized servers and databases. These vital components of the system make these online transactions real time in nature. But on the other side of the coin, the real time requirement and the central server concept attract some bottle necks in the system when the demand on the system gets to some thresholds. When this bottle neck occurs, the network becomes slow resulting in long queues at ATMs and baking halls thereby leading to customer dissatisfaction. These problems are peculiar with developing countries which are not up to par technologically.This paper takes a look at how these bottle necks can be avoided thereby improving banking system performance increasing customer satisfaction. In the recent times, efforts have been made by researcher to find out the optimal number of servers and ATMs a bank should operate for satisfactory system performance. This publication presents a better approach which is called “Preprocessed Online Banking Transactions”. This technique involves breaking a single real time transaction into two real time transactions with the network dependent part of the transaction preprocessed from the comfort of one’s home during the period of time that the network was formerly idle. The remaining part of the transaction which does not require network access is now completed at the bank’s premises later. The proposed system was modeled and simulated. The existing system was also modeled and simulated. On comparison, it was found out that given any combination of system parameters, the proposed system is steadily better than the existing one and is capable of removing long queues at ATMs, saving customers’ precious time and cutting banks’ operating cost.