Q4i has signed a five-year, multi-million dollar agreement with EDS for a range of Web hosting and managed storage services for its online brokerage product suite.
Under terms of the deal, valued at $15 million, EDS will host Q4i’s Broker IQ, the company’s proprietary financial services management system, from its Plano, Texas and Sacramento, California facilities. Broker IQ provides retail brokerage and financial services firms with a white-label ASP (application service provider) model for online brokerage services.
According to Celent Communications, online brokerage are expected to grow to 14 million by the end of 2003. The research also indicates that among the top 100 global securities firms, based on core capital, currently only 28% offer transactional capability to their customer base via the Internet.