Canadian Investor Protection Fund (CIPF)

Securities Industry Regulatory Financial Filings (SIRFF)

Customer

Canadian Investor Protection Fund (CIPF) is a not-for-profit corporation established by the sponsoring Self Regulatory Organizations (SROs) to protect customers in the event of the insolvency of a Member.

Mission

CIPF ensures, within defined limits, that your cash and securities are protected if you are an eligible customer of an investment dealer that is a Member of one of our sponsoring organizations. (Source: www.cipf.ca)

Challenge

Currently all Canadian investment firms must file monthly and yearly financial statements with CIPF to prove their financial "health". The existing process involved a PC and Mac based application that each firm used to create an export file that is mailed to CIPF. CIPF then imports each file to create aggregate totals and then mails the aggregated data back to the users. With over 200 member firms the process was not sustainable due to the highly inefficient process.

Approach

Agora developed a new Microsoft-centric solution to satisfy the needs of CIPF and the member firms.  A web-based solution was chosen due to the distributed nature of the application.

Solution

Agora has developed a secure, member-based extranet that allows member firm users to create and review financial filings online. In addition the application involves sophisticated workflow that controls the submission of the filing from the firm CFO to the reviewing manager at the SRO to the reviewing manager at the CIPF. At any stage in the workflow filings can be sent back to the previous step for corrections or modifications.

The Extranet solution was built using Windows 2000 Server, Internet Information Server 5.0, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and COM technologies. The development tools used were Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0 and Visual Basic 6.0. The Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) was used through the project. In addition, the Agora Reporting Framework with Crystal Reports was used to generate the more than 50 required reports in the system.

Impact

The solution will be responsible for a tremendous savings of time for member firms, SROs, and CIPF users. The resulting savings in time will allow the SRO and CIPF examiners to spend more time actually examining the financial filings. Firm users will immediately recognize the benefits of being able to access their financial filings from a web-browser from any computer without the need to install an application to the local computer.