Discover Brokerage

Contact:
DISCOVER BROKERAGE
San Francisco CA
U.S.A.
www.discoverbrokerage.com (DO NOT EXIST)

Tools Used:
Solaris operating environment, Sun Enterprise 2 platform, Sun UltraSPARC-II 300 MHz processor, Innovision Financial Server™, Java™, CORBA®, Innovision's Nepal™ XP framework

Problem:
Discover Brokerage was looking for a better way to deliver account information to its customers. With over 80 percent of its business composed of Internet transactions, it became essential for the firm to provide online account access to its retail clients in a cost-effective, convenient and secure manner.

Solution:
Discover Brokerage chose Innovision Financial Server, a product of Innovision Corporation, to deploy compelling and secure OFX-enabled online services. Discover's online account management service allows retail clients to use personal financial management (PFM) software, such as Money or Quicken, to access, retrieve and download account information from Discover's mainframes.

Customers link to the online account management feature by following the instructions prompted by their client software. The software then contacts Innovision Financial Server, a CORBA-based server, located at Discover Brokerage in San Francisco and safely retrieves the appropriate account information. Customers can directly download items such as transaction histories, current share prices, and market values, into the PFM application on their desktop.

Discover was able to implement Innovision Financial Server with limited resources and money available for the project. Neither outside consultants nor add-on products were needed for implementation. The application enables customers to effectively consolidate their finances and manage their assets while safely viewing their personal accounts in real time. The ability to access and download account information online eliminates the tedious task of manually keying the information.

"Innovision Financial Server connected directly with our application network and worked with all of our existing Web, database and middleware products," said John Macllwaine, Chief Technology Officer for Discover Brokerage. "The huge amount of time and money Discover Brokerage saved is a direct reflection on the complete and proven solution Innovision provides."

Legacy Data was accessed via internal APIs that Discover Brokerage had independently developed. The CORBA capabilities of Innovision Financial Server provide Discover Brokerage with a Java /CORBA solution that provide a scalable, highly reliable and distributed architecture. This gave Discover Brokerage the high performance environment that their demanding business environment required. Innovision Financial Server is running on Sun Microsystems Solaris operating systems.

The platform's central component is a powerful XML Protocol server, the most complete and easily deployed solution available. Innovision Financial Server provides full support for multiple financial protocols including OFX, IFX and FIXML. CORBA is one of the key building blocks that Innovision utilized when developing Innovision Financial Server.

Innovision Financial Server is built on Nepal, a platform that provides Java/CORBA and XML Protocol frameworks. CORBA provides the framework to build a model that allows legacy data and systems to be formalized and abstracted into new financial protocols. There are four major components to Innovision Financial ServerWeb-based Server Interface, OFX/SGML/HTTP, Object Controller and Integration Server. The integration server uses CORBA/IIOP technologies and comes with a comprehensive library of integration objects. This network-centric architecture gives financial institutions the ability to connect to OFX and other technologies. Integration is achieved using objects provided as Java or C++ classes.

In August 1995, Discover Brokerage became one of the first financial institutions to offer investing over the Internet. The company offers the self-directed investor a breadth of investment products, including stocks, bonds, options, and thousands of mutual funds.