Scenario
Please read this scenario prior to answering the question
The daily mutual fund trading cycle consists of four key processes: Transaction capture, pricing,
trading and reconciliation. Transaction capture consists of two sub-processes: manual exchange
and loans and distributions (LSD). For transaction capture, retirement plan participants use an
online account management application to enter manual fund exchange transactions. For L&D,
plan participants use a separate application to enter requests. The L&D application determines
whether the request can be fulfilled based on the mutual fund balances held in each plan balances
and a set of business rules. Each day’s captured manual exchange transactions accumulate in a
transaction database.
ArchiSurance contracts with a third-party information service to receive a file of mutual fund prices
at the close of each trading day. The pricing application uses this file to convert captured
transaction into trades, and then validates each trade against the mutual fund balances held In
each plan. The pricing generates a trade file with the minimum number of trades necessary. The
trading application sends this file to an external trading service. When the trading application
receives a confirmation file back from the trading service, it passes it to the reconciliation
application, which updates the plan recordkeeping database.
The account management and LSD applications are hosted on separate application server
clusters. Each cluster is a physically separate host that runs application server software on a set of

virtualized hosts. All of these applications use a database server infrastructure that is hosted on
another separate cluster of virtualized servers also on a dedicated physical host. The pricing,
consolidation, trading and reconciliation applications, however, are batch applications that run on
the ArchiSurance mainframe computer. All application hosts are connected via a converged data
center network (DCN), which also connects them to a storage area network (SAN) as well as a
wide area network (WAN) that is used to communicate with the external trading service. The
SANincludes two physically separate storage arrays, one of which holds data for all databases,
and another that holds data for all files.
Refer to the Scenario
A newly-formed team of systems analysts would like to better understand the business processes
and applications for daily fund trading. Describe the business processes and sub-processes, the
applications that they use, the data objects accessed by those applications, and the external
application services that access some of those data objects.
Which is the best answer?

A.
Option A

B.
Option B

C.
Option C

D.
Option D