Windows in Financial Services

While many professionals view crisis management as emergency response, business continuity or, as a business issue, a potential public relations calamity, true crisis management is multi-faceted and should be thoroughly integrated into your organization’s structure and operations.  To arrive at an effective level of crisis management requires a thorough internal analysis, strategic thinking and sufficient [...]

Measuring the market risk of complex derivatives places huge demands on computer power. RiskMetrics, a technology spinoff from JPMorgan, does it with analytics based on Microsoft .NET running on 4-way and 8-way dual-core AMD Opteron 64-bit clusters from HPC Systems.
“Our most successful penetration is with hedge funds,” said Philip Jacob, coordinator of the research and [...]

In 2005, Joe Plumeri, chairman and CEO of the global insurance brokerage Willis Group, commissioned an initiative focused on improving Willis’ operational capabilities in the US retail offices. The goal was to improve the company’s ability to provide superior client service while maintaining a keen focus on reduced operating costs. The existing operating procedures were [...]

One large custodian bank reported receiving 10,000 or more faxes from investment managers on the last two days of the month, making a mockery of the industry’s efforts over the years to become entirely electronic, standards-based with computer-to-computer communications untouched by error-producing human hands.
In some cases, custodians have themselves to blame. Some are still trying [...]

At SWIFT’s Sibos conference in Sydney, Microsoft and its key partners are addressing key concerns facing the global financial services industry such as growing top-line revenue and making better use of existing capital through improved treasury and cash management systems. To manage funds effectively, corporations need electronic connectivity between their banks and their treasury management [...]

Microsoft’s U.S. Financial Services Group recently re-aligned its management team to bring its industry expertise in banking, capital markets and insurance directly in line with the sales organization – creating three vertical units geared toward driving industry-specific revenue in fiscal year 2007.
Driven by feedback from customers, technology partners and internal product groups, the group’s new [...]

Pershing Limited, the UK division of Pershing LLC, has implemented BizTalk Server to handle the large increase in volumes of messages resulting from its expansion from a service provider mainly for private-client brokerage to one that serves institutional brokerage as well.
“Institutional business generates large trade volumes, often many thousands of trades per hour. In comparison, [...]

Hancock Bank, based in Gulfport, MS, had selected an enterprise document management system from OnBase, a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, before Katrina. But it hadn’t installed the system, Michael K. Croal, the former senior vice president and director of corporate loan operations told an audience at Gartner’s financial services summit in Boston a few [...]

Citi CIO Was an XP Early Adopter
When Microsoft launched Office XP in 2001, Bill Gates, then still Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect, was joined on a stage in New York by two executives who had been early adopters of the new technology: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Marv Adams, then CIO of the Ford Motor [...]

WFS Innovator Award for Redesigning Online Banking presented to Matt Koster,
Vice President, Wachovia Corporation, by Tracy Issel of Microsoft, with Alex
Hart, President of Corillian (left), and Greg Haislip (right) of Microsoft.