Laurentian Bank of Canada

Situation

In 1999, the Laurentian Bank was the last large Canadian bank without a Web site for online banking. The potential solutions that had been considered until then required major changes to existing systems, had high risk factors and were very costly.

Solution

After a series of careful technical validations pertaining to technical, safety, and stability issues, AXON implemented a solution whose architecture allowed to:

• Minimize the changes to existing operational systems;

• Reuse bank terminal transactions;

• Support tens of thousands of users;

• Minimize the number of licenses required to manage connections;

• Ensure the same availability as automatic teller machines;

• Provide security approved by the Laurentian Bank’s different surveillance levels;

• Achieve economies of scale by deploying the personal and commercial sites simultaneously and allowing for the reuse of components.

Results

The site was implemented in less than 9 months. During the first few weeks of activity, the online site welcomed over 30,000 users and handled peak volumes of up to 1000 simultaneous users. The site covers varied types of online transactions and was selected by the Internet performance management firm Gomez Inc. as the third best transactional banking site for its performance and overall design.