Financial Services – Scottrade
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Scottrade chooses Fiorano as Enterprise Backbone for real-time trade processing of millions of transactions
Customer Profile
Scottrade is a leader in online investing and is currently ranked highest in Investor Satisfaction with Online Trading Services by J.D. Power and Associates. The firm serves individual investors who are comfortable making their own investment decisions. Scottrade is unique in the industry because it boasts very low commission rates while offering easily accessible, local branch office support of online trading in 228 locations serving more than one million customers nationwide. Scottrade, named Highest in Investor Satisfaction by J.D. Power and Associates five consecutive times, keeps its competitive edge with Fiorano solutions.
Business Problem
In ScottradeELITE for active investors, Orders are filled within seconds, customer service is swift, and costs are low. The company offers equities, fixed income, options and more than 9,000 mutual funds - with transactions handled in real time. Every trade executed through Scottrade travels through the company's data centers. A key component of this system is an enterprise messaging product – FioranoMQ.
Trading systems require a vast amount of hardware and applications and there often isn't much standardization between components. Scottrade's real-time trade processing system runs on an IBM iSeries mainframe coupled with Dell PowerEdge servers. Applications are written in Linux, Unix, Java, and C++. Initially, Scottrade looked at a Java multicast strategy to connect these elements, but it soon became clear that to achieve its demanding throughput and availability objectives, Scottrade needed something more sophisticated with massive scalability.
Solution
FioranoMQ's High Availability (HA) feature was a major factor. It gave Scottrade's infrastructure the highest fault tolerance capability, ensuring that servers continue to operate during intermittent network or machine failures. Unlike other solutions, Fiorano offers a software-only state replication technique that enables enterprises to enjoy HA without requiring additional investments in hardware. The cost of implementation is substantially lower than competing solutions. Among the FioranoMQ features Scottrade uses is the administrative API (Application Programming Interface) that allows the company to customize the application to the company's specific needs.
"Using the product's Web interface, we were able to make a new screen for our programming staff that offered a select feature set," Polsgrove said. "That simplified the alternatives for developers and reduced the chance of errors. In addition, Fiorano technical support has also been exceptional. Fiorano provides us with premium 24x7 support and their team is always available when we need them."
Benefits
Last fall, for an unprecedented fifth consecutive time, Scottrade was awarded the J.D. Power award for Highest in Investor Satisfaction. Among the prime factors influencing customer opinions were trade execution and Web site capability.
"FioranoMQ has performed exceptionally well for us," Polsgrove said. "We continue to roll out new trading features that depend on FioranoMQ, including a new Web site front-end tool that notifies our customers when a trade is executed. Fiorano has helped us compete confidently in this market."
About Fiorano Software
Fiorano Software (www.fiorano.com) is a leading provider of enterprise class business process integration and messaging infrastructure technology. Fiorano's network-centric solutions set a new paradigm in ROI, performance, interoperability and scalability. Global leaders including Fortune 500 companies such as Boeing, British Telecom, Credit Agricole Titres, Lockheed Martin, NASA, POSCO, Qwest Communications, Schlumberger and Vodafone among others have used Fiorano technology to deploy their enterprise nervous systems.
To find out more about how Fiorano can help you meet your enterprise integration objectives, visit www.fiorano.com or Email us, we will contact you!