Farm Credit Canada, with a portfolio in excess of $10 billion, works with farmers and agribusiness firms across Canada. In the past, each of the company's core business applications was isolated, preventing customer-facing employees from viewing a customer's entire financial picture. This impacted the company's ability to market effectively to its customers, and impacted its ability to broaden its revenue mix with new products and services.

By leveraging an SOA enabled by the BEA WebLogic Platform, Farm Credit Canada has integrated several applications, including Peoplesoft CRM, in order to create a 360-degree view of customer information for its customer-facing employees. With that, Farm Credit Canada believes it can grow returns by better serving customers.

In addition, Farm Credit Canada has leveraged BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 to roll out its loan origination system and online account management system, called FCC Online Services. FCC Online Services serves the company's over 60,000 customers with services such as payment principal and interest split, insurance expense, details, history - all available 24 hours a day. FCC Online Services is helping the company achieve its goal of improving customer choice by developing alternate product and service delivery channels.

"As we build out our SOA, we expect to realize many strategic benefits, including a dramatic reduction in cost overhead," said Paul MacDonald, chief information officer at Farm Credit Canada. "The integration of our loan origination system with our customer relationship system is just the beginning. We want a single user interface that is designed to help provide access to a comprehensive set of data for our customers and employees. That can mean simplified training, more face time with clients, improved service, and a more efficient operation."

Farm Credit Canada selected BEA based on several factors, including its aggressive support for open standards, its technology and market leadership, and the track record of the BEA WebLogic Platform. Farm Credit Canada was also impressed with BEA's unified platform, which is designed to help eliminate the need to rely on multiple point products for application development, portal design, and systems integration.

"BEA can provide a complete solution that is designed to help reduce complexity and dramatically improve FCC's response time to changing business conditions," said Paul Daro, FCC's Vice-President of IT Architecture. "And the fact that BEA is a strong supporter of open standards helps us minimize risk. We aren't locked into any vendors, including BEA, and we have complete freedom to adopt any technology or build any solution that could move our business ahead."

Throughout Farm Credit Canada's work with BEA, the company has utilized BEA Services. The consulting work from BEA has included assistance in helping Farm Credit Canada develop their technology architecture, as well as providing deep expertise with specific BEA products. The BEA staff also provided knowledge transfer to ensure that Farm Credit Canada was prepared for the handoff when the consultants from BEA were done with the project.