Financial : RBC Financial Group and Sona Innovations

Company

Royal Bank of Canada (TSX, NYSE: RY) uses the initials RBC as a prefix for its businesses and operating subsidiaries, which operate under the master brand name of RBC Financial Group. Royal Bank of Canada is Canada's largest financial institution as measured by market capitalization and assets, and is one of North America's leading diversified financial services companies. It provides personal and commercial banking, wealth management services, insurance, corporate and investment banking, and transaction processing services on a global basis. The company employs 60,000 people who serve more than 12 million personal, business and public sector customers through offices in North America and some 30 countries around the world. For more information, please visit www.rbc.com

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Result

Baldhead Systems Inc. created a prototype solution for RBC Financial Group in March of 2000. RBC, impressed by the product's ability to meet current and future requirements, created a joint venture, Sona Innovations Inc. in May of 2000, a wireless application Development Company (www.sonainnovations.com) to launch a Palm powered wireless application for the bank

So far, Sona has created alliances and partnerships with Palm, Research In Motion (RIM), Certicom, Sun Micro Systems, Bell Mobility and Psion Teklogix. Sona is poised to be the global standard for wireless platforms in the next three to five years.

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Solution

The surge in the wireless industry has resulted in the inaccurate belief that wireless applications are merely an extension of the wired Internet. Many wireless solution providers in the market today are focused on creating wireless applications through the use of "screen scraping" content from a Web site and pushing the content to a browser on a wireless device, in an attempt to extend the existing wired Internet. Baldhead does not look at the wireless Internet in the same fashion. Rather, Baldhead believes that applications must be suited to the devices that they reside on. Baldhead views the future of wireless application development as a marriage of the following existing and emerging technologies:

Java + Internet / WAP + XML + Bluetooth = Real-Time Wireless solutions

• Java as the language of choice for application development on both the client and server sides of the equation.
• Internet and / or WAP as the preferred mechanism for transporting data.
• XML as the mark-up language of choice for content presentation.
• Bluetooth for device-to-device communication i.e. PDA to cell phone.

The combination of these technologies allows for a global approach to wireless application development.

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Technology Employed

• C/C++
• J2ME
• XML
• RSA/ECC encryption
• IFX
• FIX

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