Software

Automation of FTP process - full implementation

Posted on April 5, 2016April 1, 2016 by Michele Maio

The previously-implemented semi-automated business-used prototype of the daily fund transfer price (FTP) for the mortgage domain was moved to production from business to IT departments of a large Dutch bank and became an IT system under FAM responsibility.

The resulting fully-automated application was built on a consistent technology stack, which includes .NET, Visual Studio, C#, SQL-Server, SSIS package, QRM. The tool is accompanied by the corresponding graphical user interface (GUI) which was developed in ASP.NET.

This project turned out to be very challenging, especially because of: i) the interactions among various bank departments, including IT, FAM, FTP Centre and Mortgage Group; ii) the large technology stack involved. In all these cases we were in the lead.

Change more-link display text in WordPress

Posted on February 22, 2016January 9, 2017 by Jorrit de Jong

For a recent project we created an online house pricer for the Dutch market, Huizen Prijs Checker. The backend, a statistical model, was built using Java which connects to our PHP / WordPress frontend using an API. We have worked with WordPress before, but once again we were surprised to see how easy it’s to setup and customise using templates and plug-ins.

The site being local to Dutch market is all in Dutch. This meant creating pages and blogs in Dutch. Which works wonderfully. The one thing which gave us headache was the continue reading text displayed by the more-link object. The tag is inserted using the WordPress editor as shown here:

On your blog-role or category pages a link will be displayed with the text “Continue reading ->”, like so:

This wasn’t any good as our site was meant to be in Dutch. So we where hoping for something like:

It took quite some time to figure out how to get our theme to display a “continue reading” link with custom text. As it turns out this can be fixed by creating a child package. Details on how to do this can be found in WordPress Codex. Once you have the child theme setup the link text can be modified by adding a new read_more_link function to the functions.php file in your theme. This function will then override the default behaviour of the links. The following snippet does the trick. Continue reading →

ALM Robot

Posted on August 24, 2012October 13, 2014 by Jorrit de Jong

We were asked by a large Dutch bank to help with the automatic processing and testing of data. We used our Robot technology as part of the implementation.

Ugly Duckling has developed a number of products that help to process large amounts of data. We were asked by a Dutch bank’s Asset and Liability Management group to use this software to develop a prototype for a Robot that we code-named ‘Jan’.

Jan was able to monitor directories, mark up suspicious data, clean garbage data and, over time, monitor the quality of the data. The Robot Jan was able to do in 30 seconds what an analyst would take hours to do.