Financial Site Serves Up a Latin Beat

The Internet boom is heading for Latin America—a region where financial information has been tightly controlled and where obstacles, such as slow Internet access and expensive phone charges, have stunted growth. According to International Data Corporation, Latin America leads the world with 4.8 million Internet users in 1998 and is estimated to reach 19.1 million users by 2003.

One early mover that’s positioned for the surge is Zona Financiera, a one-stop financial services resource and e-commerce platform, which means ‘financial zone.’ Unlike popular Latin American portals that focus on generic news, entertainment and sports, Zona is a vertical site that covers five areas—banking, brokerage, insurance, real estate and autos—in three languages, Spanish, Portuguese and English—and 15 countries.

“I think the challenge is this, if you look at finance, there is no cookie cutter solution for the region. Every single region is different,” says Gregory Keough, CEO, a former CIA officer who later ran his own distributorship in El Salvador for brands such as General Mills and Land O’ Lakes, and founded Zona in 1997. Headquartered in Fairfax, Va., Zona is the largest financial site in Latin America, contends Keough, with half a million unique visitors every month, and four million page views a month.

While the service is free to consumers, Zona partners with financial service companies, like Vector Securities, the largest brokerage in Mexico, and charges them for passing on qualified leads. “Generally you have a very strong brokerage house in each country. So they only want to be in Brazil or Mexico or Chile or wherever they’re located,” explains Keough. Zona also built co-branded personal finance channels for broad-based Latin portals including Yupi.com, El Sitio and Universo Online, Brazil’s largest Internet services provider, and it provides content to sites like the Wall Street Journal and Microsoft.

But unlike the U.S., which is a melting pot for diverse cultures and regions, succeeding in Latin America is a more complex feat. “It’s not one country and one language, it’s 18 countries,” says Timothy Keough, CTO, who built the platform to cross pollinate data across the different sectors. “There is a lot of interconnectivity between auto and real estate and banking and insurance,” he says.

Instead of buying a feed from a market data consolidator, Zona takes direct data feeds. “We found it to be more reliable and more accurate,” to go directly to the source.” On the back end, it selected the Alliare Cold Fusion application server and load balancing hardware from F5 Networks, and also formed a co-locating arrangement with Exodus, which provides redundant connections to the Internet back bone as well as a bullet-proof bomb facility. On the database side, Zona is in the process of switching to Oracle from Microsoft SQL Server 7. With the stock and brokerage area experiencing a lot of traffic as users get quotes online and start to do transactions, the CTO adds: “We’ve seen traffic and users growing tremendously. We want to make sure that Zona Financiera is never down.” 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