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national-bank
1. Quebec’s Largest Financial Corporation Consolidates
Electronic Document Delivery with RightFax
Banque Nationale du Can-
ada . . . The National Bank of Cana-
da (NBC) is a full-service provider of
retail and commercial banking, trust,
securities brokerage, mortgage and
insurance products and services.
NBC is the 6th largest commercial
bank in Canada and the largest
bank in Quebec. Each day NBC ex-
changes critical and confidential
financial information between cli-
ents, branches, businesses, and offi-
cials, the documents includes Ac-
count summaries, Branch summary
reports, Financial reports and state-
ments, Regulatory disclosures and
information, Wire transfers, Securi-
ties reports, Deposits, Consumer
loans, Commercial loans, Mortgage
loans, Wealth management, Credit /
Debit Card. Untimely or unsecured
delivery can result in financial loss,
legal action, or missed opportunities
for the financial services institution
or the recipient. A large percentage
of the documentation that is passed
back and forth is sent via fax, as it is
the most efficient legally recognized
communication method.
CHALLENGES:
The IT department is challenged
with managing the delivery of fax
documents for business units with
multiple stand-alone fax machines,
multi-function devices and several
OpenText RightFax Business fax
servers in multiple locations.
The IT department was under pres-
sure to provide secure, reliable and
timely fax document delivery to cus-
tomers, partners, and regulating
agencies while maintaining confi-
dentiality of sensitive financial doc-
uments and integrations with front-
and back-office applications to ex-
tend and leverage current compu-
ting environments. IT was chal-
lenged with managing the 5 stand-
alone RightFax Business fax servers
that were not architected for fault
tolerance or redundancy to help
mitigate against system failures and
to ensure regulatory compliance.
The Bank relied on a Cold spare
strategy to deploy a redundant
RightFax Business Server stored in
an isolated location to be manually
activated in the event of a primary
system failure. The intention was to
use the redundant server in the
event that the production server
was system interruption or shut
down for an extended duration. The
redundant server wasn’t online and
didn’t process faxes until activated;
production databases and other
transactional files would have to be
manually copied to the passive cold
spare. Bringing the cold spare on
line would take hours and the pro-
duction system would lose the abil-
ity to receive inbound faxes during
the manual recovery process.
Hardware consolidations, Fault Tol-
erance and Disaster Recovery strat-
egy to help mitigate against system
failure challenges had to be ad-
dressed. The main task was to allo-
Company: Banque Nationale du Canada.
1100 University, 7th floor, Montreal
(Quebec), Canada H3B 2G7 www.nbc.ca
Industry: Financial & Insurance Services
Application: Upgrade multiple RightFax
Business Server 9.3 & 9.4 in several loca-
tions required consolidation in a VM instance
with RightFax Enterprise 10.6, eliminate
reliance on fax cards with FoIP, Telco, multi-
function machines & ensure functionality
with Create-Form without loss of historical
transactional Meta data and images.
Challenge: Single servers have no fault
tolerance. Reduce staff demands and costs
of managing increased fax traffic on multiple
single use servers in multiple locations ser-
vicing the country.
Solution: Consolidate multiple RightFax
Business servers into RightFax Enterprise
10.6 Shared Services architecture with FoIP,
SIP trunks and Create-Form implemented
with VMware, implementation, technical sup-
port & training services.
Results: Successful upgrade, consolidation,
significant cost reductions, improved man-
agement visibility and control of fax traffic.
PROJECT SUMMARY
Connectis Project Story FINANCIAL & INSURANCE SERVICES
2. cate more time and resources to other initia-
tives by consolidating multiple RightFax phys-
ical server workloads onto a single, active-
active shared services architecture in a virtual-
ized environment. IT Director Eric Lemay was
chosen to consolidate the RightFax servers
into a central landing zone utilizing their ex-
isting SIP trunks for FoIP (Fax Over IP), reduce
the hardware footprint and recurring annual
maintenance and supports costs and elimi-
nate any hardware Media Gateways, physical
Fax cards and Telco.
During the Discovery phase Connectis re-
viewed the future RightFax implementation in
detail including: network designs; specifica-
tion of new processes; and phased in imple-
mentation along with contingency planning
for specific scenarios. NBC had servers spread
across facilities in Montreal, Toronto and Ed-
monton that provided faxing services to entire
company with integrations to Create Form
Suite (Bottom-line Technologies) for docu-
ment output management to convert stand-
ard application output into functional elec-
tronic documents, and then distributes them
over fax lines (SIP Trunks) to deliver docu-
ments to a recipient, using numbers retrieved
from the base document or an ODBC data-
base reference.
Each RightFax server stores transactional Meta
data in SQL database. Managing multiple
RightFax SQL databases across the country
posed a challenge. IT Management was con-
cerned about excessive database maintenance
issues that might arise. Servers had to be
monitored to ensure service up time. IT Exec-
utive leadership decided a centralized moni-
toring mechanism for all inbound fax jobs
from one station was needed. NBC reviewed
the RightFax licensing, server deployments
and the recurring annual maintenance costs
to establish best practices.
THE SOLUTION:
NBC decided to consolidate the 5 RightFax
Business servers into a RightFax Enterprise
Shared Services architecture in 1 location with
two active – active nodes, 1 node dedicated
for CDBN, 1 for International Business divi-
sion, and the third node located in Toronto
configured to mitigate against potential failure of both CDBN and
International nodes. This colocation strategy eliminated the need for
2 Administrators. Centralized server access enabled easier server
management, power and floor space expenses are reduced, backups
can be performed efficiently, and security can be increased.
Connectis integrated RightFax to operate with Create Form suite to
deliver documents to a fax destination, using fax numbers retrieved
from the base document or an external ODBC database reference.
Instead of a physical Telco trunk for PSTN phone lines, RightFax is
now connected with SIP trunking which provides a virtual trunk over
the Internet to PSTN lines eliminating the need for Media Gateways,
switched telephone network (PSTN) lines; resulting in reduced opera-
tions costs for installing, configuring, and maintaining physical
phone lines and PBX's for each office.
The RightFax Server consolidation eliminated the RightFax server
sprawl at the Bank by combining the workloads running on multiple
RightFax servers into a unified architecture. The consolidation yield-
ed improved cost efficiency from higher utilization of resources,
standardization and improved manageability of the IT environment.
Standards are now more easily enforced on a RightFax server that
provides service across the country resulted in fewer Administrators
required to successfully manage the server upgrades, patches and
while reducing the complexity and time required to manage a failo-
ver. National Bank of Canada efficiency and service improved while
maintaining a scalable, adaptive and robust architecture.
CONCLUSION:
National Bank of Canada successfully concluded the RightFax over
FoIP trunks consolidation project; and gained greater control over
their IT resources, RightFax servers, SQL databases and ensured func-
tionality with their in place Create Forms infrastructure. Resulting in
improved efficiencies, a more consistent level of service delivery, and
increases in RightFax fax channel density and performance.
NBC’s stakeholders and VPs goal was to simplify, integrate and ex-
tend their current Oracle ERP environments and leverage existing
legacy technologies investments. A centralized financial document
delivery hub supports full regulatory compliance, and the system
also provides tamper resistant document delivery and notification as
well as encrypted and certified fax delivery options.
Desktop fax machines are no longer required for this process, nor are
the monthly telecom costs. Each department uses a single line, and
publishes a unique DID fax number for each internal person for fax
routing. Employees can now send and receive faxes from within their
Outlook email inbox using the RightFax Exchange Connector for Mi-
crosoft Exchange 2010. The Web Access module has been imple-
mented enabling users to access all inbound and outbound fax activ-
ity using a web browser; sending of PDF files has also been added
through the deployment of the RightFax PDF module.
