Electronic-Commerce: A Virtual Money Investment Consultant

Internet and Electronic commerce (E-commerce) are of increasing interest. It is expected that billions of USD will be earned in this new business market the next decade. The explosive growth of E-business will change totally and fundamentally the business environment of the 21-th century and this process has already began. Right now we are focusing that more and more information is accessible via Internet. Year ago the new medium was used by scientist only but now most companies have their own web-sides where they offer their products as well as many further information. Since customers need this product information in order to decide which product should be bought, one way of getting this is to access the Internet. We already can buy software, books and even products from a grocery store via the Internet. But there is no web assistance for money investment purposes (at least to the authors knowledge). This is the aim of this paper. We are focusing here on the development of a web-based application for customers who would like to invest money. Online-banking supports the movement of money from savings account to some other account for instance but these systems do not yet support the money investment. So, we present how customers can be guided interactively to find out where to invest there money. Our interactive bank agent will select the most appropriate investment forms based on special needs of customers. In order to find the best saving plans several questions about the personal situation need to be answered. Developing such a web-based application must combine several different technical aspects like product presentation (in form of WWW-pages), Internet communication (in form of HTTP, IOOP), database (managing all data), and programming the consultant (in Java). Our online consultant system is based on client/server [5] and the CORBA [2, 3, 4, 6] model. CORBA is a result of a standardization process of the OMG (Object Management Group) in which over 800 companies (e.g. SUN, IBM, HP) are involved. CORBA models a distributed system based on objects on heterogenous platforms including the needed communication infrastructure. The communication mechanism is transparent for the programmer and easy to use. CORBA is a middle-ware between operating systems and application programs. The paper is divided into the following parts. In the next section we describe the money investment consultant system. The third section discusses and presents the result of the software design process. Then in Section 4, we give an overview of the implementation. Some remarks and our conclusions finish the paper.