The Customer:

A subsidiary of a very large bank with global operations set up to create new avenues of business services, with technology as the driver.

The Challenge:

In a scenario of ill-defined contours of a nascent business concept of Web-based escrow services, i-flex solutions was required to make a clear requirements definition. The challenge was to envision the flow of the business from the buyer/seller contract stage in the exchange site to the ultimate settlement with the seller. The second important challenge was to provide accounting safeguards for the numerous exceptional conditions expected to arise, some of which are:

	payment made, but the seller cancels the shipment
	goods shipped, but the buyer rejects a part of the shipment
	shareable escrow fees
	exchange site commission to be paid by the seller
	exchange rate issues with different buyer and seller currencies, as also currency differences in site commission and exchange fees, among others.

The challenge was to build internationally-accepted accounting standards into the system along with audit safeguards even for the most complicated eventuality.

Recommended Solution:

A two-fold methodology was followed. With the generic accounting flows for each stage of the transaction clearly defined, we sought to make the concept comprehensible to business users as well as developers and enable proper testing by creating actual detailed models. Detailed multi-currency regular and exception-condition-accounting modes were created with more than forty envisaged scenarios.

Customer Benefits:

The recommended models equipped the client with:

	accounting flows and detailed models covering scenarios expected to arise when the system went live
	an accounting set-up definition taking complete care of the cash flows arising out of the customer- and back-office business processes defined for the Web site. The client's trust in i-flex methodology was such that the concurrence of the accounting expert deputed by i-flex was considered essential by the client to ratify any changes to the models