The Canadian Toronto Dominion Bank has a web site (http://www.tdbank.ca)
up and running since February 1995, but the fifth largest Canadian bank
with an asset of $114.8 Billion is not satisfied with it.
Oh, no. The award winning web site is getting tens of thousands of hits
a day all right and it remains to be one of the more popular webstop in
that country, but it just that the TD Bank sees a much bigger future in
this hot new interactive medium that has been growing by leaps and bounds
over the last two years.
So what does TD Bank want to do on the Internet? Two folds. An immediate
implementation and a long term goal. First, let's talk about what the TD
Bank has done recently on the World WideWeb.
On July 15, TD Bank has launched a pilot project to allow some of their
merchant customers to setup shops on the Internet to sell goods and services
to the general public using credit card as a payment method. A number of
Canadian organizations have joined the program including Statistic Canada,
Nuvo Network Management and Integrated Communications & Entertainment
Inc.
Statistic Canada, the Canadian government agency who collects and publishes
statistical demographic information is making its reports available for
downloading at $3 a copy. Previously, someone interested in making a purchase
would have to contact a representative to place an order.
With the help of Open Market's SecureLink software, Statistic Canada is
able to link up its own web site (www.statcan.ca) with the TD Bank site
for secure purchases over the Internet. TD Bank would use OpenMarket's
OM-Transact software to handle the credit card transaction, transfer funds
into StatCan's TD Bank account and send an acknowledgment to StatCan for
order fulfillment. In short, TD Bank will do all the back-end stuff while
freeing its merchants such as StatCan to concentrate on front-end merchandising.
TD Bank seems to be finding a happy customer in Statistic Canada. Michael
Thoen, StatCan's Internet application development manager noted, "This
fits in well with our plan to outsource all financial transactions and
allow the organization to focus on its core competence, which is the collection,
analysis and dissemination of data."
However, it remains to be seen of how TD Bank is going recoup its expenses
for providing this service to its merchant customers. As of now, TD Bank
is at an exploration stage. "We've gone into this pilot to see whether
the market will be able to bear a transactional fee, or if we'll have to
cover costs in some other form," said a TD Bank spokesperson.
So what about the long term goal? Well, TD Bank is aimed at expanding its
Web based financial services to the general public. As a start, they are
moving ahead with its TD Access program last month which would allow customers
to log onto the bank's private network via a PC running a proprietary MS-
Windows based application. Customers can check account information, transfer
funds, get stock quotes, pay bills etc.
TD Bank has plan to make this program available on the Internet once the
security concern has been addressed. To that end, TD Bank is installing
and testing a custom designed firewall product from Digital Equipment aimed
at protecting the bank's financial data and other confidential information.
As TD Bank sees it, the weakest point in a secure transaction link over
the www between the customer and the bank is at the bank itself. As a TD
Bank official noted, "Breaking into a128-bit SSL [Secure Sockets Layer]
session with proprietary code laid on top is going to be very difficult...
the most vulnerable point of attack is at the bank itself."
