System and Method for the Automated Brokerage of Financial Instruments

• US 20090240613A1
• Filed: 03/26/2009
• Published: 09/24/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 10/22/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Scottrade Incorporated (Charles Schwab Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Scottrade Incorporated (Charles Schwab Corporation)
• Inventors: Tully, Michael James, Scott, Virgil Michael
• Granted Patent: US 8,615,454 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/35
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 40/00 Finance; Insurance; Tax strategies; Processing of corporate or income taxes
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 40/04 Trading; Exchange, e.g. stocks, commodities, derivatives or currency exchange
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 40/06 Asset management; Financial planning or analysis

Abstract

Disclosed herein in a preferred embodiment is an automated financial instrument brokerage system wherein a front end layer interacts with customers to generate activity requests for an intermediate layer. The intermediate layer preferably processes the activity requests and places financial instrument orders on a financial market if appropriate. A backend layer preferably provides data to the intermediate layer for processing activity requests. Multiple heterogeneous front end customer applications may be supported by the same intermediate layer. Further, multiple backend layer applications may interact with the intermediate layer in a manner transparent to the front end layer. Further, scalability can be achieved be partitioning various tasks of the intermediate layer onto separate servers, and more preferably on separate redundant servers. Load balancers may then be used in the intermediate layer to provide distributed access to these servers. Also disclosed herein is a caching technique whereby turnaround time for processing activity requests can be reduced by reducing the number of times that the intermediate layer needs to interact with the backend layer.

Claims

1. A method of scaling an automated financial instrument brokerage system, the system comprising a plurality of applications in communication with a plurality of server groups, the applications being configured to generate activity requests related to one or more financial instruments in response to input from a remote user, the activity requests having a plurality of activity request types, each server group comprising a plurality of servers configured to process a different type of activity request, the method comprising:

providing at least one load balancer to connect the applications with the server groups;

registering each server of the server groups with the at least one load balancer;

directing the generated activity requests from the applications to the at least one load balancer;

distributing, from the load balancer, the directed activity requests among the registered servers.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the providing step comprises providing a different load balancer to connect the applications with each server group, wherein the registering step comprises registering each server of the server groups with the load balancer associated with that server group, and wherein the directing step comprises directing the generated activity requests from the applications to the load balancers such that each load balancer receives activity request types that are to be processed by the server group associated therewith.

3. The method of claim 2 wherein the activity request types comprise an order activity request, a customer account activity request, and a quote activity request.

4. The method of claim 2 further comprising:

providing a new redundant server for a server group; and

registering the new redundant server with the load balancer associated with that server group.