Richard Wafer

Hall of Fame Inductee 1996

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Richard Wafer believes that information technology is transforming all of business, and the financial services industry in particular. If so, it's because people like him are making it happen.

Wafer is Vice-President, Information Systems at Vancouver City Savings Credit Union, the world's largest community-based credit union and a recognized pioneer in innovative retail banking systems. Since joining VanCity in 1988, Wafer - a 30-year veteran of the computer industry in England and Canada - has led the implementation of a services delivery strategy that is showing the banking industry the way to the future.

One of Wafer's most outstanding accomplishments was the creation of VanCity's Interactive TV Home Banking System, the world's first fully interactive TV-based banking system that is available, not just to homes with broad-bandwidth connections, but to any home with a TV and a telephone. The customer simply places a compact disk in a player hooked up to the TV set and does banking transactions using a TV-style remote control. The system debuted in November, 1994. Since then, VanCity has produced microcomputer-based versions of the system, the first in Canada.

In another industry-leading initiative, Wafer led a pilot project in which VanCity teamed with VISA to offer a smart card that credit union members can use to pay for products and services from local businesses. This was the first implementation in North America of a general-purpose, stored-value smart card.

Most recently, Wafer has directed the technological planning for Canada's first branchless bank. Citizens Bank of Canada, to open early in 1997 as a subsidiary of VanCity, will offer services anywhere in Canada to customers who will do all their banking over the telephone or computer, or by using a television or an automated teller machine.

Such innovations have brought new customers to VanCity - especially 18- to 35-year-olds - and have pushed up profits by 1,300 per cent since 1989. More interactive services are on the way as Internet commerce develops, and VanCity, with its $4.4 billion in assets, believes that its experience to date is merely a foretaste of the future.

"The status quo is a certain recipe for failure," Wafer says.