You have heard of e-mail, e-commerce, e-Business, e-tailers... now welcome e-wallet™ from the Center. Our patented e-wallet™ solutions basically are personal data-encrypted files that promise to help remove shopping roadblocks. Here is what we mean: Picture being in a grocery store or large retail chain when all of a sudden 40% of people leave their half-empty shopping carts in the middle of aisles and leave the store all at once... Or, imagine the frustration of shoppers who have taken the trouble to pick out a cart full of attractive items at good prices only to be held back by a store clerk insisting that they complete a lengthy questionnaire and remember a password they were assigned when they last visited the store several months ago. This is unfortunately what is currently happening at many e-commerce Web sites today.

The reason why this is happening is that those sites do not have a standard solution to authenticate sales and the required standardized forms that modern computer systems need to "talk" to each other. But most Canadian chartered banks ARE standardized ! Your systems have to be standardized in the same way for them to operate properly together. This is why at the General Center for Internet Services we have developed our e-wallet™ solutions. These scenarios may be unacceptable in a bricks-and-mortar store, but they have long been considered inescapable aspects of Internet retailing. But now, the Center has changed all that, thanks to a set of tools we have carefully designed to take much of the aggravation and tedium out of shopping on-line by providing an electronic file in which people can safely store their names, addresses, credit-card numbers, passwords and any other information they may need for registration forms on e-commerce sites. Known as electronic or digital wallets, our patented e-wallet™ solutions automate the process of registering at new sites or logging on to sites you have visited before. Instead of filling out a new form or typing in your user name and password, you simply have our e-wallet™ software perform these tedious tasks automatically for you.

It's very convenient for the consumer (your customer), and for the merchant (you or your company) it means more transactions and more business completed and more sales. It is our experience that merchants are frequently frustrated by the fact that more than 40 per cent of consumers abandon their on-line purchases when they are confronted with requests for personal information. Can you blame them ? Although electronic wallets have been around for a couple of years, their use was severely restricted because there was no common standard for exchanging information with e-commerce sites. Various services, such as on-line bookstore Amazon.com, developed wallets for their own customers, but consumers had to use a different wallet if they wanted to shop elsewhere. Now, after 2 years of research and development in our own labs, our new generation of e-wallets™ solutions are here, the result of a common set of protocols for putting information into on-line forms agreed upon in 2000 by all major players in the industry and, so far, three Canadian chartered banks: the Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of Nova Scotia and the Bank of Montreal.

Click here to find out how the world's biggest online retailer, Amazon.com leverages the power of e-wallets™ on all its Internet properties.

e-wallet™ from GCIS uses a newly released standard: the Electronic Commerce Modeling Language. ECML works with any Web-security software and enables our e-wallets™ to automatically feed customer information into the payment forms of participating merchants. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft® Corp. has issued a wallet called Passport™ that consumers can use at a growing number of Internet shopping sites, all of which are required to conform to commonly accepted privacy standards. One major drawback of the Passport™ solution is that it only works with a handful of e-commerce sites. The wallets that we have developed take different approaches to safely storing customers' information on any Web site. We actually have two types of wallets:

     GCIS e-wallet S-1™ is what is known as a "thin wallet".

     GCIS e-wallet S-2™ is actually a "fat wallet".

These terms actually refer to the size and nature of the files, rather than how much information you can really store in them. Our e-wallet™ S-2 solution actually sits on your customer's own computer (s) and contain all the software needed to send credit-card numbers and other information securely to various shopping sites. Our e-wallet™ S-1 thin solution is stored on servers controlled by your bank or other service providers, whose software manages the exchange of information with the merchants' sites. While we were actually developing our S-1™ and S-2™ solutions, we met with the IT divisions of most Canadian chartered banks in order to get better input and to make certain the high levels of standardization we wanted to achieve would be met. With the approval of all banks concerned in our project, our software architects and engineers reached the conclusion to place both wallet solutions on customers' own browsers for logistical reasons. Both methods are perfectly and equally secure. The problem with storing the files on the bank's server is that it may eventually take up too much space if millions of customers decide to use any e-wallet™. Our software, both our e-wallet™ S-1 and e-wallet™ S-2 solutions are both available as of February 15, 2000. Our S-1™ thin wallet solution makes more sense for consumers because they can get at their file from any computer. Our e-wallet™ S-2 solution requires that merchants also install our BridgeBook S-8™ software. BridgeBook S-8™ software from GCIS is necessary so their on-line forms can capture information from consumers' wallets. If consumers want to do business with retailers who do not have this software, they will not be able to fill out the forms automatically but still will be able to use our e-wallets™ to copy and paste information into the forms.

Developed in our laboratories, our BridgeBook S-8™ solution is also fully capable of "learning" new ways of entering data on forms. For example, if a merchant uses an unusual category of field in a form, the first consumer to use the merchant's site may have to tell the program what information to enter, but our software then intelligently remembers this change and will not have to be told again. This means that consumers can finally shop anywhere and, in a very secure way. Some wallets from our competition fail because they neglect to securly sign up merchants, and that limits where they can use the wallet. Our BridgeBook S-8™ solution also provides customers with a way of keeping records of all their on-line transactions, a feature that most customers appreciate. Ali Hamza, an expert in electronic banking and senior vice-president at Ernst & Young, predicts other Canadian banks will follow suit if the wallets catch on with consumers.

                         

For more information, feel free to contact us. Our express Hotline Solutions Desk phone number is: (450) 437-8757. Our express solutions e-mail address is: info@gcis.ca We would be very happy to meet with you and evaluate your exact e-commerce needs at a convenient time and date that suits you and your peers.

                  

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