Windows in Financial Services

ING Investment Management Americas, the U.S. investment arm of ING Group, has leveraged Microsoft SQL Server 2005, .NET Framework 2.0 and ASP.NET to create a unique real-time solution for accessing and analyzing reference data. The ING application, called Relative Value Application, analyzes securities to determine their investment potential and streamlines the management and use of [...]

A few years after its merger with Cleveland-based Smythe Kramer, and with its mortgage business now topping three-quarters of a billion dollars in originations based on last year’s totals, Pittsburgh-based full service real estate services firm Howard Hanna has moved to standardize the mortgage systems its different businesses have been using.
After looking at both systems [...]

In an industry undergoing rapid transformation, the worldwide market leader in enterprise software has been reshaping its product offerings and adjusting its market focus to position it for the next generation of software. Last year the leader in CRM, ERP, and supply chain software caused a stir in the CRM market when it introduced CRM [...]

AEGON Group, a Netherlands-based global purveyor of life insurance and retirement planning (annual revenue: $57 billion), needed a way for its 30,000 financial advisors to share information instantaneously and inexpensively. The firm’s old suite of desktop tools was just no longer adequate for identifying and servicing the myriad estate-planning and wealth-distribution requirements of a growing [...]

Ark Syndicate Management, a newly launched UK-based company, which will begin writing policies April 1, used Microsoft-based N-DEX from Northdoor to launch quickly with customized policy and claims administration. The syndicate, which is Lloyd’s newest managing agency, “will underwrite a composite account to include casualty reinsurance, hull and cargo, marine aviation and transit reinsurance, energy, [...]

Excellence in development involves an awareness of the latest technology and the initiative to adopt and deploy it. But it also involves the creativity and inventiveness to find new ways to integrate, extend and tailor advanced technologies to support the increasingly high-powered demands of today’s business environment.
The four projects described on these two pages embody [...]

Although online banking keeps skyrocketing in popularity, access has been limited so far mostly to desktop and notebook PCs. To give users of smaller handheld devices a similar sort of Web experience, Wachovia Bank has now launched an initiative dubbed “On the Go Banking.”
Since its rollout last September, Wachovia’s new program has served up an [...]

Microsoft and Novell may not be natural partners, but some financial firms are already cheering their new pact.
Given the number of mergers and acquisitions in the financial services industry, most institutions have a heterogeneous infrastructure environment, complete with more than one operating system. If only the systems vendors collaborated to increase interoperability, that complexity and [...]

For banks that have long struggled with delivering multiple solutions across multiple channels, there’s some new help. Microsoft’s Banking Integration Factory is a set of best practices and standards that will help banks achieve consistency in integrating services and optimizing the various channels through which they reach customers.
“It’s about beginning to put together a lot [...]

The rise in hedge fund assets under management (AUM) from some about $200 billion in 1997 to about $1.3 trillion early this year, and the increasing complexity of the 10 or more different trading strategies hedge funds use are placing ever higher demands on primes.
Primes, or prime brokers as they used to be called, are [...]