Brokat Partners With Diffusion to Create Notification Product

Riding the wave of personalized customer interactions, Diffusion has teamed up with BROKAT Infosystems, a leading provider of secure e-commerce services, to create an event-driven notification product that's being aimed at financial services companies.

According to research firm, the Meta Group, 35% of all customer contact will be via nontraditional, electronic means and that sales for customer relationship management (CRM) products and services will grow from $1.5 billion in 1998 to $4.7 billion by 2001.

If the demand for CRM holds true, then it bodes well for Diffusion and Brokat. The two firms recently signed an agreement to jointly market and resell Diffusion's CRM system to be integrated with Brokat's Twister e-services platform. To integrate with back-end legacy systems, Twister uses a CORBA-based software infrastructure to enable the deployment of electronic brokerage and payment services.

The union appears to be a complementary match. As Jim Gagnard, president and CEO of Diffusion explains it: "Brokat is strong in accessing legacy data and in delivery to special channels. We're good at personalization, outbound and inbound communication. The combined product provides an excellent end-to-end solution for firms."

The fact that Brokat's client base includes more than 1,600 institutions in the brokerage, banking and insurance fields in Europe-among them Deutsche Bank and Allianz-doesn't hurt either. The firm is based in Stuttgart, Germany and opened its first U.S. office in Atlanta last year. Diffusion whose main offices are in Mountain View, Calif., currently has clients that include NationsBank, GTE, BankOne and WIT Capital.

Wit Capital, an online brokerage and investment bank, sees the value of the bundled Diffusion and Brokat prodouctsand has signed on to license use of the tool to be launched along with the redesign of the firm's Web site later this year.

"The Diffusion product is really about being able to alert people to investment opportunities in a variety of different ways," says Sue Berkowitz, a Wit Capital spokesperson. "If you can't be by a computer all the time and want to get your IPO alerts by pager, you can do so. If you also want to get them only by e-mail and then come back to the site and place a conditional offer and review the materials, you can do that too. It's all about alerting and being in constant communication with your user base," she says.

For more information, go to www.brokat.com and www.diffusion.com. Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio