 |
 |
|
|
|
In 1995-96, ARRAY Development had developed an original interactive Web site that contains the information and forms required to buy Canada Savings Bonds in partnership with the Bank of Canada, the country's Central Bank, for Canada Investment and Savings (CI&S). Our company had also provided ongoing Internet site maintenance, facilitating Canada Savings Bond seasonal sales campaigns from 1996 till September 1999. CI&S is the Agency of the Federal Department of Finance responsible for directing and operating Canada's multibillion dollars retail debt program and for developing its long-term strategy. |
|
The fully-featured and bilingual Web site that we had prototyped and originally developed offered all the information and tools necessary to help Canadians make the right purchasing decisions when it comes to buying Canada Savings Bonds. The CI&S site includes a sophisticated built-in original calculators of our design that enable clients to estimate the value of various series bonds as they mature. It also contained a wealth of well-focused text files, audio ads and even movies that help customers make informed choices when purchasing Canada Savings Bonds for their RRSP and RRIF plans. The Canada Investment and Savings Web site had been conceptualized as simple and straightforward enough to be used by casual investors, yet to have all the power and flexibility required by expert investors to conduct more sophisticated transactions. Each campaign's Web service from 1994 till 1999 had been progressively more complex and the CI&S site had been used by more and more customers. Thus, starting from the 1997 campaign, CI&S had announced some novel retail debt initiatives such as Canada RSP Bonds and CSB-RRIFs, and added much larger purchasing limits. By using the Web service during the campaign, CI&S clients could have ordered Canada Savings Bonds directly from the Bank of Canada for as much as $600,000.00. Jointly with BankWorks Trading Inc, the Toronto-based world-renown leader in defining strategic services for major financial institutions, ARRAY Development had participated in defining an implementation strategy for selling CSBs on the Internet. The project evaluated the operational, security, technical and marketing viability of the implementation strategy and its timing. It resulted in an exhaustive comparative analysis of existing payment schemes and their suitability in the emerging Internet banking environment. Other past and ongoing ARRAY Development project with the Bank of Canada were in support of reengineering of their essential backroom operations, thus improving the efficiency of distribution channels for retail debt products. In conducting these projects, we defined and prototyped an efficient Extranet-based network in support of streamlined communications within sales channels. The exploration included critical components of a virtual private network, such as:
ARRAY Development has been at the forefront of the move towards Internet banking and commerce. The company assists in the conceptualization and development of sophisticated and functional electronic commerce sites for leading international and Canadian companies and Government agencies. It also assists financial institutions in restructuring their mission-critical electronic banking processes as Extranet services. |