Case Summary

The fraud monitoring department in Scotiabank needed a way to centralize available information on how to handle some of the processes. Something more accesible than a bunch of online documents no one knew where to find.

The lack of this centralized easily-accessible information resulted in me and my colleagues being unsure sometimes as to whether a procedure should be followed a certain way or another. This caused some internal inconsistencies in our day-to-day operations.

As I had already been a couple months into my learning journey to become a software engineer, I identified the problem and started building a web application that would allow people to find the correct procedure to follow with a simple search or the pressing of a couple buttons.

Once built, it was deployed to the internal network of the bank, and the link was shared with everybody in the department. As people started using it, they realized they could have much more satisfactory and faster interactions with customers. Problems were being resolved quicker and in a much more thorough and consistent way.

This was in 2019, and last I heard (2023), the application is still in use.

My Take

I am very proud of this project. I had to do my fraud monitoring activities during working hours, so I took lunch time and off-hours at end of day every day to build it on notepad, all before heading off to university to continue my commercial engineering studies focusing on entrepreneurship and innovation.

Though it was a simple application - no CI/CD pipelines, no dependency management, no release planning, no cloud infrastructure, no backend services, no container orchestration, etc - just a browser-run dynamic html document, this experience taught me first hand what it is like to create a solution that addresses a real pain point. That we can solve problems we identify. That by doing so, we make other people's day to day a bit better. That when we are able to make people's lives a bit better, the very people benefiting from the solution start also chipping in by providing feedback and feature requests that can only make the solution better.

I will always be grateful to my colleagues and friends at Scotiabank, and how they helped move the solution forward by using it, providing feedback, and making feature requests to me. I will also be grateful to Scotiabank for giving me recognition on it by awarding me with the yearly "Best of the best" medal.