Windows in Financial Services

As HP’s Treasurer for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a region with approximately $32 billion of revenues in FY04, Sarah Jones is a demanding customer for the commercial banks that the company uses to handle its transactions across the region, and at least as demanding when it comes to investing the approximately $13 billion [...]

Property and casualty (P&C) insurance agencies that expand into benefits are finding that the new business line not only increases total revenue, it brings the agency into a tighter relationship with its clients.
“The benefits business is becoming a profit center for a lot of agencies,” said Rick Morgan, senior vice president of marketing and strategic [...]

$102 billion. The number tends to get attention, even in Washington where, the late Senator Everett Dirkson famously commented, “A billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
$102.6 billion (you wouldn’t want to entirely forget another $600 million if you were holding the paper) is the size of the [...]

“It’s an arms race.”
That’s how Dr. James Holt describes the effort that Chicago-based Townsend Analytics, Ltd. confronts in keeping ahead of the fast-growing volumes of quotes and messages coming from exchanges, ECNs, and other liquidity providers. Customers of the firm’s RealTick® market data, analysis, and direct access trading platform include retail investors, day traders, hedge [...]

Some asset managers are responding to the growth in regulatory demands by outsourcing their compliance.
It may seem a bit counterintuitive (how can someone who doesn’t work in the building keep up with a lot of traders and portfolio managers?) but for managing the highly quantifiable rules issued by the SEC it has proven attractive to [...]

Ever wonder if you embarrass your computer? You know, the way kids find their parents hopelessly embarrassing?
“OK, you can drop me off here…no need to come in. And when you come to pick me up, just call my cell when you’re here and I’ll come out…”
When you connect to the network does your computer take [...]

What can be even more useful than Excel in finance? How about Excel with powerful and sophisticated add-on visualization tools?
Oculus, a Canadian firm whose principals survived acquisitions and spinoffs from Visible Decisions, has developed a toolkit of graphical displays that work from Excel data.
“Over the years Excel has added advanced charting features,” said Richard Brath, [...]

Rapid Addition, a SWIFT partner in London, is making BizTalk work faster with FIX messages while preserving the order of message flow – essentials in financial services. But that’s just the beginning, said Kevin Houstoun, director of Rapid Addition, chairman of the FIX technology committee, and a consultant to several major banks.
“If you look at [...]

In 1999 AIM Investments in Houston, TX was facing renewal of its license for IBM’s MQSI middleware. Instead, the investment firm chose to go with Microsoft BizTalk 2002 and SWIFTAlliance on Windows NT using MSMQ to extract messages from Thomson’s Portia and transmit to SWIFT Network.
The old infrastructure had been costly, said Farooq Jawaid, principal [...]

Capital markets firms are facing a data explosion that requires them to change the way they plan and implement their technology. Algorithmic trading, which accounts for just 10 percent of current order flow, has driven up the volume of pricing data faster than analysts can track it. The TABB Group estimates algorithmic trading will account [...]