About CS-COOP
CS CO-OP is a publicly held Banking Firm founded in 1908. Over that time, CS CO-OP has been committed to being the best at anticipating and meeting their members’ needs through integrity, trust, pride in service, understanding, and continuous improvement. CS CO-OP understands that its members are its owners, and that it exists to provide those members with the best financial services and products to be found anywhere.
Looking towards future growth, CS CO-OP launched Alterna Bank in 2000. It is the first bank to be established by an Ontario credit union as well as the first bank created by a Canadian credit union to offer "bricks and mortar" branches. As a bank with a national charter, Alterna Bank can bring CS CO-OP's philosophy to a larger community, offering its traditional benefits and commitment to service excellence, client focus, reinvestment and community involvement.
Project Requirements
CS CO-OP has implemented a web site to disseminate information and provide online financial services to its members through their cscoop.ca and alterna.ca web sites. Following an internal study on the overall capabilities of its web sites, CS CO-OP found the following:
- It’s menus were poorly designed resulting in ineffective and inefficient information access;
- The ineffective use of frames made the site appear unprofessional and technically out of date; and
- The poor content organization led to unnecessary difficulties in managing information.
Accordingly, CS CO-OP decided to revamp its web site, provide a solution that will allow non-technical users to update web content, and provide an easy means to update time sensitive pages, such as financial rates that need to be updated both quickly and accurately.
Solution
As a solution to the above identified issues, BAU created a project plan that consisted of the following two distinct objectives:
- To incorporate the existing site content into a new site template and then proceed to convert it to Active Server Pages; and
- To create a Web Publishing Solution, integrated with the new site template, that will facilitate site management.
To accomplish the above, BAU began with two requirement gathering exercises which documented functional customizations to the existing MemberDirect 4.1 application and a thorough analyses of the specific ISO 8583 messages that were being emitted by MemberDirect. The outcome of this study was a specification document that recommended required changes to the WBMS messaging processors.
BAU began this project by upgrading CS CO-OP’s online offering from MemberDirect version 4.1 to MemberDirect 5.0. As the core banking system, Summit, of CS CO-OP had recently been replaced, BAU created a new middleware component that would intercept ISO 8583 messages from the newly upgraded MemberDirect 5.0, and send compatible web service messages to the new core banking system.
During the course of this project, BAU provided resources to fill the following roles:
- Project Manager
- Programmer Analyst
- Information Architect
- System Analyst / Designer
Technologies used included Oracle, JAVA, JPOS Java based ISO8583 message parsing toolkit, C++, Jakarta Axis web services development framework, WSDL (Web Services Definition Language), MS Project and CVS version control.
Project Outcome
The BAU Canada solution is currently in its pilot phase. This pilot system is currently being run through its test procedures. The pilot system solution meets and/or exceeds all CS CO-OP requirements and is expected to decrease service requests from client members, while at the same time diminishing or eliminating client difficulties and/or augmenting positive client experiences. Furthermore, the final solution will provide a non-technical user with the functional capabilities to publish time sensitive material onto their web site. |