Windows in Financial Services

For banks, compliance is about to move to the next level – the enterprise. ember ec3 Inc., a Toronto-based firm, has released .HeatShield 2.0 to provide an integrated and comprehensive risk and compliance application. Four major banks are working with ember to pilot .HeatShield. One bank with a multi-state presence agreed to talk about the [...]

Deposits provide the majority of the profit for the consumer financial services industry. While transaction and savings deposits currently account for only 10 percent of consumer financial assets (down from 16 percent in 1993), they provide 40 percent of revenues and translate to almost two-thirds of total industry profits associated with managing consumers’ assets, based [...]

Ian Sands, whose official title is director of industry strategy at Microsoft, first read about Umpqua Bank in an architecture magazine. With a background in Microsoft research and the Microsoft Consulting Group, he has created a team that takes leading edge technology and shows how it might be used in real world settings such as [...]

This is, of course, the time for resolutions about how to become better, wiser, richer, or more loved. I haven’t been much good at applying such resolutions to my own life, so this year I am happy to offer them to others, specifically to folks in the financial services industry.
Automate Fully to Cut Insurance Costs
Partial [...]

Dan Woodman has been named Microsoft’s industry architect for insurance. He has an extensive background in both technology and financial services, has co-authored two books about SQL Server and worked in Microsoft’s developer relations group under Sanjay Parthasarathy. For the last three years he has been part of a global team that focused on helping [...]

I just got off the phone with a Sprint call center. Helpful man, he went through my account and transferred the billing address in just a minute or two. Before ending the call, he asked if he could interest me in Sprint PCS service. And then the inevitable, “Have I provided satisfactory service to you [...]

TD Canada Trust has quickened the process of creating retail risk reports without adding headcount to the team responsible for producing them.
The bank’s retail credit risk department develops reports to help credit centers identify issues before they become problems. But several of its most essential reports were time consuming to produce and require very recent [...]

NASDAQ has replaced aging Tandem mainframes used to disseminate market data with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 running on the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system. The system runs on two 4-node Dell PowerEdge 6850 clusters.
The system supports NASDAQ’s Market Data Dissemination System (MDDS). Every trade that is processed in the NASDAQ marketplace goes [...]

Alenka Grealish is the manager of Celent’s banking practice. Her research focuses on the automation of the financial supply chain, B2B payments, check imaging, and retail Internet banking. Prior to joining Celent, Ms. Grealish worked for The Boston Consulting Group and for the Federal Reserve Bank, where she was an associate economist.
Which banks are getting [...]

Forget focus groups. Instead, watch what your customers are doing. That’s the thinking behind Synapse Technology’s Event Based Marketing solution (EBM) and the concept of Right Time Selling.
Every night, its application, built on SQL Server and .NET, reviews up to 25 months of customer loan and deposit records hunting for significant departures from a customer’s [...]