Customer Success Story
LINEINVEST
BT Infonet Helps Lineinvest with Latin American Expansion
Lineinvest is the leading independent online distributor of financial products in Latin America. Lineinvest's financial portal is designed to meet the needs of individual investors. The company provides investment research, economic information, news updates in real time, rates, quotes, charts, a variety of banking products, as well as offering its customers a dynamic online investment community.
Taking an independent approach, Lineinvest offers its customers selected financial products including mutual funds, stocks, and loans from leading banks and other financial institutions. To offer the best financial products to its customers, Lineinvest has also formed agreements with the leading mutual funds, brokerage houses, insurance companies and local banks.
Complementing its broad financial product line, Lineinvest also provides books on finance and economics - as well as offering tangential business services including travel reservations through alliances with major Web sites.
To support its 18,500 registered members, Lineinvest maintains offices in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Perú and Chile. The company also plans to expand its operations throughout the entire Latin American region.
Creating a Local Approach to Personal Finance
Committed to focusing on the individual investor, Lineinvest's goal is to become the leading distributor of financial products for Latin American markets. When Lineinvest recently expanded its operations from Argentina and Brazil into Chile, Peru and Venezuela, Pablo Sametband, the Chief Technology Officer for Lineinvest, responsible for data communications, telecommunications, application development and IT infrastructure, wanted to provide those new customers with a local approach to personal finance. That meant providing each country with a site that was customised to meet its financial product preferences. He also wanted to ensure that customers experienced high-speed connections and performance to all of Lineinvest and their affiliate sites.
"We were looking for a solution that enabled us to have our sites in Chile, Peru and Venezuela up and running very quickly and, at the same time, provide easy access for content updating," explains Sametband. Another critical issue was connection speed in each country. To address this issue, Sametband looked to the U.S. for the availability of higher bandwidth. By placing Lineinvest servers in the U.S., the company could take full advantage of this higher bandwidth and ensure faster connection times.
Providing High-Speed Connection Performance
"We evaluated several proposals from leading vendors," says Sametband. "We chose BT Infonet because they were able to provide us with a private, dedicated connection to our servers through a virtual private network (VPN). They also provided co-location services through their Global Center facility in San Jose, California, as well as high-performance Internet access." BT Infonet gave Lineinvest the advantage of having one provider for all services, and thus a single point-of-contact for the administering of the entire infrastructure.
Lineinvest also chose BT Infonet's Global WebHosting Service because of its ease of integration with their VPN service. BT Infonet's WebHosting Service allows Lineinvest to focus on its core businesses, without having to absorb the cost and staffing demands of establishing and managing Web server facilities. "BT Infonet's Global WebHosting provides a good environment for our servers and affords us their round-the-clock technical assistance," states Sametband.
Currently servers for the Chile, Peru and Venezuela sites, as well as Lineinvest's global "Latin American" site, are co-located in BT Infonet's Global Center facility. BT Infonet has also established a VPN with two access points, one in Lineinvest's offices in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the other at the Global Center. In Phase Two of the implementation, additional access points will be added for Lineinvest's offices in Brazil, Chile, Peru and Venezuela.
From its headquarters in Santiago, Chile, one of the world's most exciting emerging markets, BT Infonet serves multinational companies that are headquartered in Europe, Asia and North America, as well as expanding within the region.
As Lineinvest expands its financial portal throughout Latin America, the financial giant will utilise BT Infonet's Global Intranet Services to unite and consolidate local and regional communications. "BT Infonet has shown a strong commitment to the Latin American market in which we operate," remarks Sametband. "Based on their customer service, responsiveness and high technical standards, we look forward to a long and continued relationship with BT Infonet."