COMPANY: TD Ameritrade
CHALLENGE: Maintain a system for processing and reconciling trades, and managing customer accounts with a focus on performance, reliability and scalability.
OUTCOME: TD Ameritrade has very high confidence that they can continue to add accounts, whether it’s 10,000 at once, 100,000 at once, or a million at once, without stressing the InterSystems data platform technology infrastructure.
Key Benefits
- Performance
- Reliability
- Scalability
In 1975, TD Ameritrade started as a small brokerage firm in Omaha, Nebraska. It was a pioneer in helping the self-directed investor, being the very first brokerage firm to institute trading by touch-tone telephone. TD Ameritrade was also one of the first to offer Internet trading to individual investors – and they saw their business take off. Today, TD Ameritrade is the largest online equity broker in the world.
Several years ago, TD Ameritrade did approximately five-to-six thousand trades a day, Now, with its acquisitions, they average about 500,000 without major upgrades in infrastructure.
TD Ameritrade’s Back Office System (BOS) “does all the heavy lifting,” of processing and reconciling trades, and managing customer accounts. InterSystems data platform technology is the foundation of their Back Office System, which is considered the heart of a financial organization. TD Ameritrade has very high confidence that they can continue to add accounts, whether it’s 10,000 at once, 100,000 at once, or a million at once, without stressing the InterSystems data platform technology infrastructure.
TD Ameritrade is confident about the support they receive from InterSystems. For example of when TD Ameritrade merged with Datek – a move that suddenly brought 875,000 new customers into the TD Ameritrade fold, InterSystems provided planning support, technical guidance during the preparation phase, and had staff onsite with TD Ameritrade technical staff the entire three-day weekend while the conversion occurred. The key aspect of InterSystems data platform technology in the TD Ameritrade environment has been its reliability, scalability, and the fact that it’s built for speed.