Profile of a Web-based imaging solution

SwiftView: A Web-based Imaging Solution
Low cost and high fidelity take the paper out of financial reporting

By Joel D. Freeman
Special to Intranet Design

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All commercial web site operators are concerned with making money from their sites, but DataTrac Corporation has a somewhat different agenda. The privately held, Milwaukee-based financial data reporting company established web-based services with the aim of helping their subscribers - banks, credit unions, and other lending institutions - make money. This article profiles DataTrac's success using a unique delivery mechanism based on print driver technology to provide database-generated information to financial service organizations.

Banks only seem to march in lockstep. Regulatory compliance notwithstanding, financial institutions must distinguish themselves to remain competitive. To do so, banks track interest rates offered by their competitors. Rates vary widely, depending on an individual bank's strengths, product lines, and business preferences. (Related article: "Interactive Banking & Customer Retention," 02.Jul.98).

Knowledge is Power

"Knowing the rates in your geographical area is key to an individual bank's marketing strategies," says Jan Pierce, DataTrac Director of Public Relations. "Many times, it's the smaller, local banks that can be truly competitive."

That's where DataTrac's 10-year old subscription service, also called DataTrac, comes in. The service compiles banking information including credit card, mortgage, CD, and loan interest rates in near-real time at some 11,000 banks and credit unions nationally. DataTrac then sells the well formatted data to its 2,000 or so subscribing industry members.

"There's nobody else out there on the web publishing the kind of competitive reports we are," says Pierce. In the process, once-local DataTrac has gone national while building the largest bank rate database available on the Internet.

Rate information is collected daily for weekly reports tailored to individual subscribers' needs. Up to 300 individualized reports are produced every night, each ranging from 3 to 25 pages in length. Delays are not acceptable, according to Dean DeBack, Systems Engineer and manager of the DataTrac web site: "The data is timely. [Subscribers] need it the day it's produced."

DataTrac looked for a way to eliminate the time and expense of faxing rate reports to myriad individual subscribers. The goal was to put data from an existing system directly on the web while streamlining the workflow, and preserving the accuracy of the reports. Doing this would give DataTrac and its subscribers a distinct competitive advantage.

Preserving data accuracy

DeBack considered converting reports to HTML or Adobe PDF, but soon abandoned the notion. "All [database managers] want to do," he says, "is to manage the process. They don't want six months of converting documents." Automated converters are available, he noted, but "they're not exact," and without absolute accuracy, DataTrac's reports would be immediately suspect.

"A converted file is not a photocopy," DeBack added. "To get that, you'd have to convert every file into a graphic. The file would be huge; the download time would be immense."

Ironically, the solution was hidden in what DataTrac had regarded as a potential problem: the database's report file format. All reports from DataTrac's HP9000 system, including those already archived, are output as PCL (printer control language) files, the data format used by Hewlett-Packard LaserJet^TM printers. A PCL file viewer, especially one available as a browser plug-in, would resolve multiple issues in one blow.

After a lengthy search, DeBack found his answer: SwiftView, a plug-in file viewer from Northern Development Group, Inc. (NDG), of Portland, Oregon. SwiftView^® displays in a browser PCL and other standard formats that are normally printed on paper. Because SwiftView uses the printer data stream, the screen display is a precise replica of the printed page. Similarly, a SwiftView document can be printed without requiring the software that created it or a third-party application.

DeBack liked SwiftView because it was "the only [PCL viewer] that worked within a browser environment." What's more, he got the simplified, streamlined implementation he demanded, without programming or document conversion.

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