The new application functionality brings more accuracy and productivity to the Automobile Dealer Financing process.

• Enhanced user interface improves accuracy and productivity
• Automated payment process
• Faster error notification
• Provides more up-to-date information

Scotiabank expects to almost eliminate a 20% transaction reject rate with a new Microsoft ASP.NET site.

Scotiabank's Dealer Finance Centre network, which finances roughly $6 billion per year in flooring invoices to almost 600 auto dealerships, had a problem: its existing mainframe system's monthly reports were not timely enough to be useful to dealers for inventory management. Furthermore, the payment process, based on lengthy vehicle identification numbers (VIN), was prone to errors. While the system provided the required backend functions, it really needed a modern interface, both for the dealers and the bank.

Adele Pugliese, Software Project Manager: "We were getting a 20% reject rate on transactions because of VIN errors, and we process about 250,000 transactions a year. The transaction errors wouldn't show up until 2 days after input, so it was inefficient.

"We were also hearing from dealers that they wanted more up-to-date information about their automobile inventory from the Bank and wanted to access it day-to-day.  When a dealership called the Dealer Finance Centre for a flooring balance, it would require using a two-day-old report and updating it with yesterday’s transactions just to answer the dealer’s question.

"We wanted to automate the payment process, while fitting into the existing payment architecture. We also wanted to give the dealer access to their inventory numbers and exception reports on a daily basis, and give them access to current general financial information like interest costs. The way we did this was to go out and ask our dealer clients and our Dealer Finance Centres how they wanted the new system to look and to operate."

Chris Harvison is the Software Architect for Scotiabank's External Access group: "We already had some experience with Microsoft® .NET, from an upgrade we did to an in-house application. The upgrade involved replacing a LAN-based communications layer in a Win32®-based client application with a SOAP-based layer, in order to allow the application to work over the Internet. We implemented first with the SOAP Toolkit and later with the [Microsoft] .NET Framework. We got about 1,500 users upgraded without incident! We felt very good about that—we expected a lot more bugs and bruises.

"The flooring application was a good candidate for us to get experience with [Microsoft] ASP.NET web sites, because it was a very well-defined product with a clear scope. The business unit was also well defined: we didn't need to deal with many different groups within the bank.

"We completed the flooring site with a couple of months of development. We found the core functionality of Microsoft .NET to be very solid. Visual Studio® .NET is one of the best development environments there is right now.

"We're now looking at ASP.NET's fragment caching as a way of speeding up the display of our dynamic Web pages. We expect to see significant performance improvements."

Robbie Spencer, a consultant from Syntergy, Inc, who implemented part of the ASP.NET site: "The development environment is very useful and really speeds things up. It's great having all the languages and tools in one place—you don't need to go to different applications to write Web pages, C# code, and [Microsoft] SQL [Server™]. The debugger is one of the more important cost saving features.  Developers spend much of their time debugging code.  The debugger provided with Visual Studio .NET greatly reduces the time spent on this task.

"We used data grids very heavily, for example to display inventory. Binding data to Web controls is very easy, and the user interface you can put up with Web controls really spices things up compared to HTML tables. Web Controls like the data grid do generate HTML tables.  However, it is much easier to add functionality and format the tables using server controls rather than worrying about writing cross platform code that will work on all platforms (i.e., [Microsoft] Internet Explorer, Netscape, etc.)"

What lies ahead for Microsoft .NET at Scotiabank? "We see it as an important part of what we're doing," says Harvison. "There are lots of opportunities in the automotive area using the .NET architecture as a foundation."

Spencer adds: "We'll eventually want to call our business tier interfaces as XML Web services. That will allow us to reuse our business objects easily elsewhere in the bank.  For example, we could easily leverage the XML Web services (business objects) in order to expose the flooring data to a PDA (e.g. a Pocket PC or a wireless device). Microsoft .NET makes it very easy to expose an object as a Web service."

Pugliese agrees, but focuses on the near-term gains: "We expect to cut our 20% transaction error rate down to near zero. With 250,000 transactions a year, that's 50,000 errors a year we won't have to deal with anymore."

Original article available as case study #13702 on www.microsoft.com.