Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ: INTU), the leading provider of personal and small-business financial management software and an innovator in Web-based financial services, and Financial Technologies International Inc. (FTI), developer of real-time customer bookkeeping and consolidation software for large banks, brokers, and investment managers, today announced that Intuit has licensed The Box Universal Financial Server and Global Financial Data Model (GFDM) software products from FTI. In addition, Intuit invested in FTI. The terms of the investment and licenses are undisclosed.
"We approached FTI last year to explore ways that FTI technology could help us accelerate some of our plans. We discovered a strategic platform and we decided to invest," states Bill Harris, Intuit executive vice president.
Intuit's Quicken®, the top selling personal financial software product, is already engineered to request and receive information electronically in the Open Financial Exchange protocol. The Box is engineered to consolidate banking and investment accounts and works in conjunction with an Open Financial Exchange server as an intelligent information hub connecting a financial institution's in-house systems and the Internet. Further details will be disclosed in forthcoming product announcements beginning later this year.
"We tested The Box and Global Financial Data Model in our Mountain View labs for performance, flexibility, functionality, and content and found them to be a unique, well-engineered solution," said Eric Dunn, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Intuit. "Plus, in FTI we found a partner with valuable, scarce financial software skills and experience."
"Intuit is simply the most accomplished, respected, and forward-looking financial software company in the world," said Charles J. (Chuck) Lewis, FTI chairman and CEO. "Intuit's endorsement carries universal recognition and brand loyalty. We are proud."
The Box and the Global Financial Data Model
The Box Universal Financial Server is an enterprise-strength real-time multi-currency accounting and account consolidation server which is used to provide information to consumers and small businesses, as well as for other information needs within a financial institution. The Box updates and retrieves information from a relational database structured according to FTI's Global Financial Data Model, which is widely recognized by major financial institutions, industry analysts and the top four leaders in data base management technology as the de facto standard financial enterprise database design. The Box and Global Financial Data Model enable users to store and relate information about financial transactions, cash balances, investments, customers and counterparties, institutional structure, and externally sourced market data. The products support the full range of domestic and international currencies, securities, calendars, and time zones. The Box is a rules-driven message-processing engine, which continuously posts cash balances and securities positions as transactions occur. It is an ideal solution for asset management and customer service applications that require information from multiple front office and back office systems to be consolidated and enriched. Its open distributed architecture includes thin clients (HTML pages or Java applets) and integrates third party query, OLAP, and data mart tools. The Box scales to very high transaction rates.
