AVIX

On May 22 Tango 11 launched a new comprehensive web application for banking and stock
trading within Second Life. The AVIX site is the Allenvest Virtual Internation Exchange, and they
trade stocks, issue dividends, and provide interactive banking services on the web and within SL.

The Tango 11 team created and launched the site in 3 weeks, and continues to enhance
the site. We are partnering with Allenvest to provide a number of new features and business
areas in the coming weeks. In particular, new banking features and communications
functions for investors and traders are in the works.

Technical Overview

The software is a fairly complex transaction engine, with over 40 tables in the database.
While Tango 11 has done various kinds of commerce and ERP work in the past,
this project is actually more complex in some ways.

Stock transactions

A typical business or accounting application usually deals with only one party involved
in a transaction. For example, an order management application maintains inventory,
and sells it to customers. Or a purchasing application deals with buying inventory from
vendors.

In this application, we handle many parties in every transaction. Here are all of the
sub-transactions involved in the simplest possible stock sale:

There are at least three parties involved in every transaction: the buyer, the seller,
and the broker. Stock quantities are maintained for the buyer and seller, and account
cash balances are maintained for the buyer, seller, and broker. Some stock sale
transactions can be quite complex, with a single buyer buying shares from many sellers
at different prices in the same transaction.

Dividends

A dividend involves a cash payment to all of the stockholders of a company.
Dividend transactions can be very large. Here is a sample dividend:

Initial Public Offerings

An IPO goes through several phases, each of which is supported by the site:

• IPO application. A user applies for an IPO
• Review.. AVIX personnel review the IPO, and discuss details with the applicant.
• Approval. The IPO is approved, and preparations are made for launch.
• class="MsoNormal">Launch. The IPO is launched, and people can buy shares.
• Reversal. In unusual cases, an IPO might be reversed. This complex transaction
  involves refunding money back to each of the purchasers of IPO shares. The system
  handles this process easily and quickly, even when hundreds or thousands
  of purchasers are involved.
• Completion. This makes the shares available for public trade.

Business Rules

Each of these transactions are essentially complete general ledger batches that must
always balance and must pass a huge number of business rules before they can be posted.
Samples of these business rules include:

• Reserving cash. When a user places a buy order, cash must be reserved
  to pay for that buy order, in case it comes to fruition. The user cannot spend that
  cash or transfer
  it to another account unless he cancels the order.
• Reserved stock. When a user enters a sell order for some shares, those shares
  cannot be sold or transferred.
• IPO accounts. Certain kinds of accounts and shares have restictions placed on them
  about not being sold or used within a certain time period.

Banking

The system pays interest on cash balances, at 0.2% compounded daily (yes, that's right,
compounded daily). Other banking features are in development.

Admin Control Panel

The administrator control panels allows an at-a-glance view of what's going on. This
includes operations statis tics, as well as various workflow items such as IPO applications
and customer service issues.

Customer Service

We integrated a customer service facility into the web site, for customers to report issues.
The system facilitates the routing of those issues to different people until the issue is
resolved.

The customer service feature allows service personnel to communicate back and forth with the customer using a forum-style comments function.

Whenever comments are posted on a trouble ticket, the system automatically contacts
the user within Second Life, by communicating with servers located on the Allenvest land
within SL.

Come check it out

This is a very complex business system, with complex business rules and detailed
accounting that is carefully balanced and enthusiastically scrutinized. While it may be
"a game", 99% of e-commerce sites out on the web would just love to do the kind
of volume this site is doing in its opening days.

Come check it out if you'd like to see it. Signing up for Second Life is free, and you can get in
and buy some stocks and play with it with just a few Lindens (the SL currency).
As of the time of this writing, Lindens sell for about 270 Lindens per US Dollar. Most stocks trade for 0.5 to 2.0 Lindens, and there's no minimum quantity for stock trades or minimum balances for deposits.