ABSTRACT
Most of the activity in the area of online financial services has focused on infrastructure development. This chapter helps the readers to learn what a Personal Financial Appliance (PFA) is and how it might work for them in meeting their online financial services challenges. The PFA is designed specifically to mitigate the finance chores of average people. The PFA will give financial institutions the ability to deal with creeping complexity by containing the functionality their customers need most. A PFA can reside on a user’s desktop, running as a browser plug-in or as a stand-alone object that provides interactive real-time banking functionality via the Web. Early versions of PFAs represent the first of a new class of software designed from the ground up as an Internet software appliance; we expect more PFA types will enter the market as financial institutions respond to the needs of their broader market base.
