2000-05-04|Preparing Your Business for the E-commerce Age
To whom it may concern
Thank you very much for the "Preparing Your Business for the E-commerce Age" presentation.
My company (HyperInfo Canada Inc. <http://WWW.HyperInfo.CA/>) has been doing E-commerce on the Internet since 1995. My on-line publishing and knowledge export business has used First Virtual and ClickBank for transaction processing. Back in 1995, I had to obtain a U.S. bank account because Canadian banks were not on the Automated Clearinghouse (ACH) system operated by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Here is a quote from one of the U.S. financial service providers.
Canadian banks are scheduled to be added to the ACH system late in 1995. This is an unfortunate and temporary limitation, which will be removed just as soon as we can get the necessary infrastructure in place to support multiple currencies.
Well, Canadian banks are still not on the ACH system 5 years later, except for a few special cases, despite globalisation, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
I would rather pay banking service charges to Canadian banks rather than to U.S. banks. So, I would like to request that the priority of general cross-border fund transfer via the ACH system be bumped up by the Government of Canada, Canadian Bankers Association, Canadian Payments Association, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Chartered Accountants of Canada, etc.
By the way, since 1996 I have repeatedly requested to Bank of Canada that monthly currency exchange rates at the Bank of Canada website be published in TEXT or HTML format, instead of PDF format which requires extra software to read. I still have to use a telephone every month in order to get this very simple piece of information instead of the Internet :-(.
