Product Approval Process (PAP) is a business process meant to ensure that new banking and insurance products comply with internal and external rules and regulations, as well as ING business conduct principles.

The PAP business process was implemented by back and forth emailing of requests and approvals between Commercial Parties and Risk Parties. Emails were either filed in (network accessible) hard disk folders or in paper based filing systems. Until now ING had no central filing system for PAP dossiers. Participants experienced the PAP process as cumbersome, overly time-consuming and not transparent.

PAP Digitaal is an automated tool that supports communications between commercial parties, risk parties and other participants within the PAP process. The tool also allows central filing of PAP dossiers along with (email-) communication and resulting decisions.

The 'PAP Digitaal' tool is designed to minimize behavioral changes for commercial parties (product managers, segment managers and sales channel managers), risk parties and other participants in the PAP process, by promoting email as the predominant user interface. 'PAP Digitaal' achieves this by acting as an email 'traffic agent', routing emails back and forth between commercial parties and risk parties. 'PAP Digitaal' is meant to be a flexible tool that does not enforce workflow business rules, but leaves workflow to the user's discretion. 'PAP Digitaal' puts product managers, segment managers and sales channel managers in the driver's seat of the PAP process.

The application has both a web based user interface and an email based user interface and therefore communicates through HTTP, SMTP and IMAP protocols. For authorization and authentication 'PAP Digitaal' relies on ING's existing Microsoft Active Directory and Windows Integrated Security systems.

'PAP Digitaal' is built using ASP.Net 1.1 and SQL Server 2000. The architecture and implementation of the product are compliant with both the .NET Application Development Framework 1.1 and ING's Technical Application Framework 1.x (TAF). During the course of the project, the application passed several architecture and code reviews from ING's CoE (Centre of Excellence) .Net.