The Customer:

A trust and investment services firm.

The Challenge:

The customer is part of a technology group that is setting up an Internet-based financial services supermarket under its umbrella. The first component of this proposed offering was to be a Web-based trust and investment advisory service that would provide individuals and institutions with value-added, low-cost alternatives for trust services, investment consulting, professional investment management, comprehensive financial planning, and qualified plan consulting.

The business proposition offers the above Web infrastructure and supporting services on a co-branded basis to "channel partners", small and mid-sized financial intermediaries, and others, who wish to make this service part of their offering. The offering is a platform comprising investment managers, financial planning tools and advisory services, tied together to an execution and record-keeping capability, thus providing an end-to-end service to the customer.

This patent-pending process required the assembling of an integrated platform of front-, mid-, and back-office components to deliver services online.

Recommended Solution:

i-flex was first called upon to provide technical support to the architecture of the proposed platform and service. Subsequently, when the mandate was received to define the detailed requirements for the system, both a technical and functional resource was provided by i-flex for developing a comprehensive requirements document, which laid out the business and technical parts of nearly twenty component sub-systems which were involved in the complete service.

The platform-integrated components were for:

 a trust company

 profiling

 optimization

 investment management