The newly formed relationship between Sybase and Intuit reflects the growing requirement by financial institutions to support their customers' access to financial information through multiple channels. Using the recently announced Sybase Financial Server, financial institutions will be offered end-to-end compatibility with Intuit's Quicken.

"Sybase's long-term strategic vision is to provide comprehensive offerings to the financial services marketplace," said John Chen, president and CEO of Sybase, Inc. "Working together, we can leverage Intuit's personal financial management leadership and Sybase's long-term experience and leadership in serving the enterprise transaction processing needs of financial institutions around the world. This benefits financial institutions by providing open access to their customers' accounts and transactions."

"Teaming with Sybase is part of Intuit's commitment to delivering Internet-based financial solutions and services that both streamline and improve the interaction between customers and financial services companies," said William H. Harris, Jr., executive vice president of Intuit, Inc. "By combining our product strengths with Sybase's enterprise capabilities and financial services leadership, this opportunity accelerates the development and adoption of online financial services, and joint delivery of compelling customer solutions across banking, brokerage and other financial services."

Financial institutions have been looking for support for the Open Financial Exchange specification by an enterprise vendor in order to adopt this important standard. The recently announced Sybase Financial Server will provide financial institutions with end-to-end Open Financial Exchange-based connectivity to Intuit's market leading products, including Quicken.

As a part of this relationship Sybase and Intuit will commit engineering resources to develop interoperability between the Sybase Financial Server and Intuit's Open Financial Exchange-based personal financial management products, such as Quicken. Open Financial Exchange is a specification for the electronic exchange of data that streamlines interoperability between software used by consumers, such as Intuit's Quicken, and those systems used by financial institutions, such as Sybase's Financial Server and enterprise data management systems. Sybase's recently announced Financial Server will include Open Financial Exchange as one of its supported protocols.

Sybase and Intuit will collaborate on furthering the adoption of Open Financial Exchange by institutions across the financial services industry. Sybase, with Intuit's endorsement, will implement an Open Financial Exchange certification program so that vendors of client and server systems will be able to provide technology which is compliant with the Open Financial Exchange specifications.

Sybase will join Intuit's Open Financial Exchange Solution Provider program, which will enable both company's sales teams to jointly recruit U.S. financial institutions to become Intuit marketing partners and Sybase Financial Server customers.

"The joint commitment of Sybase and Intuit to providing compatibility between their respective server and client products will give financial institutions greater confidence in delivering Internet-based retail financial products to their customers," said Dale Kutnick, CEO and Co-Research Director of META Group. "This alliance further substantiates our view that financial institutions will require more robust solutions to provide customers on-line access."

Both Sybase and Intuit's efforts will be directed at supporting the converged specification of Open Financial Exchange 1.5 and Integrion's GOLD at a later date. Both are currently utilized by major financial institutions and service providers to enable the electronic exchange of financial data between themselves and their customers.