Block Financial Corp. Chooses CA's Unicenter TNG To Help Manage Web-based Banking Services.

ISLANDIA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 18, 1997--

"Unicenter TNG Was Obviously The Most Complete Product

For Enterprise Management In The Market"

Selected After Extensive Review By H&R Block Subsidiary

Block Financial Corp., an H&R Block, Inc. subsidiary, has chosen Computer Associates' flagship enterprise management solution, Unicenter TNG, to enable end-to-end management of its electronic commerce servers.

The servers are used to take Block Financial clients -- small to medium-sized financial institutions -- onto the World Wide Web and to provide the means for bank customers to check account status and to pay bills electronically. Unicenter TNG will be deployed to monitor and manage servers to ensure maximum service uptime.

Unicenter TNG was chosen to bring reliability and scalability to Block Financial's Internet-based financial services offering, CONDUCTOR (R) (http://www.conductor.com). According to Allen Yang, assistant vice president of Networking Technologies at Block Financial, "Unicenter TNG was obviously the most complete product for enterprise management in the market. The others we looked at were going to have a lot of catching up to do."

Block Financial evaluated Unicenter TNG to manage its internal environment and remote locations. Unicenter TNG provides the industry's first integrated, business-centric platform for monitoring and administering multi-platform environments. It is a uniquely powerful solution for bringing business discipline and operational efficiency to distributed computing operations. Block Financial views Unicenter TNG as a key to containing costs, improving service levels, and quickly meeting new customer demands.

Growing Financial Services Offering

CONDUCTOR is an online "supersite" for personal finance. Block Financial is establishing partnerships with financial institutions to make the service "a financial marketplace where customers can choose from a wide array of vendors and services, including credit cards, bill payment, deposit accounts, mutual funds, securities, insurance, financial software, stock quotes, news, weather and more."

The site's cutting edge technology gives the end user a fluid and well-controlled experience as well as access to multiple financial providers. Block Financial calls CONDUCTOR "the next generation of financial services -- totally integrated products and services, without the shrink-wrapped box. The strength of CONDUCTOR will be its ability to customize each customer's computer screen with specific products and services."

CONDUCTOR is growing by leaps and bounds. Among the first services offered by CONDUCTOR was access to WebCard(sm) Visa, a credit card product created specifically for the Internet and World Wide Web users. Visiting the Web site, users learned that they could turn their computers into personal banking administrators, capable of accessing important financial records -- including statements, payment records, and credit lines. Card customers can also download financial data into personal financial management programs, such as Quicken, Managing Your Money, and Microsoft Money.

Bill Anderson, president of Block Financial, reports that 25 banks have already signed up to participate in the CONDUCTOR offering, and expects to have 75 by the end of the year.

During the second quarter of 1997, CONDUCTOR plans to add an online bill payment service with payment processing provided by CheckFree Corporation. Unlike other electronic bill payment options, WebPay(sm) from CheckFree requires no software on the user's PC, allowing access from any Internet-capable PC at anytime.

The focus today is on adding more partners -- banks and other financial institutions -- to the CONDUCTOR Web site. Kris Rodgers, vice president of marketing at Block Financial, said the idea has tremendous appeal to institutions and their customers.

"We are taking banks onto the Web so that their customers can have greater access to their information," said Rodgers. "A few larger banks are already doing this, but the small to medium bank often lacks the resources to provide the service to their customers. With CONDUCTOR, they can compete with the larger banks."

Real Time Access To Information Over The Internet

According to Jake Geller, chief technology officer, Block Financial provides each customer with an on-line front end to the bank. "Some banks have their own data processing, and we interface their systems to our dedicated server. We can offer the bank's customers real-time access to their information over the Internet, which they really like."

For each client financial institution added to CONDUCTOR, Block Financial fields a dedicated server. Servers are interconnected using a switched network based on technology from Bay Networks. Reliability and availability of the network and systems platform is critical to the success of the CONDUCTOR offering. Unicenter TNG was tapped to manage servers after several alternatives were evaluated.

Unicenter TNG provides comprehensive end-to-end enterprise management for TCP/IP, SNA and DECnet networks, and fully supports UNIX, Windows NT, AS/400, NetWare, mainframe platforms, Internet and Intranet servers. It is only fully-integrated management solution incorporating network discovery, topology, performance, events and status, security, software distribution, storage, workload, help desk, and change management.

Given the tremendous growth in numbers of servers anticipated in 1997, Block Financial regarded the scalability of an enterprise management solution that it selected to be of paramount importance. Upon review of Unicenter TNG and its scalable manager/agent technology, Block Financial was convinced that the product was sufficiently robust to manage production environments as the number of servers increased.

The best-in-class scalability of Unicenter TNG is a function of its manager/agent architecture. Its intelligent agents can share data with peer agents and perform filtering, correlation, and automatic response at the agent level. This reduces network traffic, provides critical and timely information to managers, and improves efficiency.

Agents can be created to monitor a wide range of devices, as well as databases and applications. The Unicenter TNG Agent Factory facilitates efficient agent development and deployment, consolidates common functionality at a single integration point, simplifies data sharing and correlation of events, and provides policy-based automation and integration with agents written by third parties. With peer-to-peer information sharing, subagents can access common information leading to a richer management architecture.

Block Financial executives were also pleased with the ease of management offered by Unicenter TNG. The enterprise management solution provides comprehensive manageability through an integrated policy-based management infrastructure, common management applications and consistent graphical user interface.

Unicenter TNG features a compelling 3-D Real World Interface that enhances the ability of managers to visualize and pinpoint problems in the IT environment. 3-D object rendering and animation makes it easy to visualize and immediately grasp even the most complex relationships between enterprise resources.

Block Financial spokespersons report that they were particularly impressed with the product's ease of deployment and autodiscovery capabilities. The unique discovery function in Unicenter TNG covers the entire spectrum of IT resources. Starting with the network, Unicenter TNG discovers all the various devices and connections, along with topology information, and populates a common object repository with this data. The autodiscovery function also discovers networked systems, databases, and applications, including client and server components, versions, and configurations.

"Autodiscovery in Unicenter TNG is completely distributed," said Yogesh Gupta, CA senior vice president of product strategy. "Unicenter TNG can discover the configuration of extremely large networks through its parallel discovery technology."

This powerful capability provides companies like Block Financial with a revolutionary, comprehensive view of their infrastructure. In addition, by populating the object repository, it provides a common, shared information store leveraged by all management functions of Unicenter TNG.

Unicenter TNG Helps Block Financial Realize Its Vision

With Unicenter TNG, Block Financial expects to maintain the high availability and service level excellence that will help the company realize its mission: to create next-generation, technology-driven financial services that are convenient for the end user and strategic for their financial institution clients. When next-generation net-based financial services meet next-generation enterprise management solutions, the result can only be value to the customer.

Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA), with headquarters in Islandia, N.Y., is the world leader in mission-critical business software. The company develops, licenses and supports more than 500 integrated products that include enterprise computing and information management, application development, manufacturing and financial applications. CA has 9,000 people in 130 offices in 40 countries and had revenue of more than $3.9 billion in calendar year 1996. CA can be reached by visiting http://www.cai.com on the World Wide Web, emailing [e-mail] or calling 516/342-5224.

Block Financial Corp., a Montclair, NJ-based subsidiary of H&R Block, Inc. develops and provides technology-driven financial services, such as a credit card and online financial services and a middleware home banking solution. In addition, Block Financial Corporation publishes personal productivity software programs, including Kiplinger TaxCut, Kiplinger's Small Business Attorney and Kiplinger's Home Legal Advisor. Headquartered in Kansas City, MO, H&R Block, Inc. is a diversified company offering tax and financial services. H&R Block is the country's largest tax preparation firm, serving 17.4 million taxpayers in nearly 9,700 offices in the United States, Canada, Australia and 15 other countries and territories in 1996. In the United States, H&R Block Tax Services, Inc. handled approximately one in every seven returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service this past tax season. -0-

Note to Editors: All referenced product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

CONTACT: CA

Bob Gordon, 516/342-2391

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