payments. Encorus focused on software and professional services for the "mobile payment" business (payment by the means of mobile phones). In 2005 the Encorus business was acquired by Qpass. The Professional Services department and the rest of Brokat was bought by Brokat's longtime opponent in the German market, Data Design AG in 2001. In 2003 Data Design was finally acquired by the Hungarian Interactive Net Design (IND). Technology Brokat developed mostly banking-related software and provided professional services mainly to financial institutions. Brokat was known for its encryption server and applet technology named XPresso, which made strong encryption (128bit symmetric) available without US (especially NSA) interference. Brokat sold its software to many large financial institutions mainly in Europe, especially Germany. In addition to providing systems to established institutions, Brokat also created solutions for startup companies. A prominent example for the latter is Cortal Consors. The company tried to get in the middleware software business by developing the application server Twister. Twister was the base technology for nearly all customized solutions implemented by Brokat. Twister Twister was the main product of Brokat AG. It was a proprietary middleware software that was created in the late 1990s and was always sold as the central software product in all projects. The software was mainly sold to financial institutions which often also relied on the XPresso encryption software of Brokat. The base of Twister was a CORBA Object Request Broker written in C++ that handled requests from so-called Gateways and routed them to so-called RDOs. RDOs are comparable to the more modern EJB JavaBeans (server software objects). Backend systems such as legacy mainframe applications or database servers were accessed through so-called "Accessors". RDOs could be written in TCL, Java or C++ and interact with each other regardless of the language. Despite this cross-language functionality, most projects were implemented in a single language, most often TCL or java. Twister 4 also supported the EJB java object model. Twister was capable of handling very high loads and was thus used by electronic stock traders like Cortal Consors for real-time trading. During the morning hours when the stock exchange opened, the Twister System at Consors was known to handle several thousand connections/requests simultaneously. Innovations Brokat was a pioneer in encryption technology by providing a java-Applet-based encryption toolkit, named Xpresso. The protocol of this toolkit was named SRT (Secure Request Technology). Technically, it was a 128bit-key implementation of the