Windows in Financial Services

Recognizing Outstanding Innovation in Deploying Advanced Microsoft Technologies
Technological innovation can drive competitiveness and lay the foundation for leadership. For companies in the fast-paced financial industry, the key to success is aligning advanced technologies to meet specific business needs. The ten firms profiled on the following pages have done just that. They have adopted technologies ranging [...]

Insurance companies often say they have a distribution strategy, but what they often really have is a compensation strategy. Many believe as long as they get the compensation right, everything else will fall into place. In some instances, that may work. But Springfield, Mass.-based Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual) wants to better understand who [...]

Hyland Software provides an enterprise content management (ECM) software suite, which addresses insurance companies’ core requirements for managing content enterprise-wide.
The suite, called OnBase, is used by more than 220 insurance companies worldwide, including organizations ranging from small independent agencies to large tier-one carriers. Managed general agents, third-party administrators, agencies and brokers can reduce costs and [...]

Ten More Spanish Banks Select SunGard’s BancWare
SunGard has been making great strides into Spain. The company announced earlier this month that ten more Spanish savings banks have chosen SunGard’s BancWare for asset liability management (ALM) to help monitor and manage their interest rate, foreign exchange and liquidity risk. They will also be using BancWare for [...]

Established in 2004, the investment management firm Clearbrook Financial prides itself on its embrace of a philosophy that is still new to the financial services industry: transparency. In executing that philosophy it has formed strong partnerships with financial technology vendors.
For one, Clearbrook uses CheckFree Corp.’s APL-based products (named after an array of programming language dubbed [...]

It has been a couple of years since Texas-based Barnard Donegan Insurance moved to a .NET-based agency management system. In that time, the firm has added offices, replaced a paper-shuffle with document imaging, and saved as much as an hour and a half each day in the reduction of repetitive entry tasks.
“It has really helped [...]

Visionaries in the payments industry discuss connectivity, cost, standards and efficiency.
By Paul Allen
Automation and efficiency are evergreen topics within the financial services industry. But in the payments sector in Europe these forces are being given extra impetus by the launch in 2010 of the Single European Payments Area (SEPA).
SEPA was hatched in response to demands [...]

United Kingdom-based mortgage lender Money Partners has drastically cut the time it takes to update legal forms with an XML-based automated document management system.
The company has put the system, X-Merge from Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Dot Net Solutions, to use for compliance purposes by setting it up to update forms including key facts illustration [...]

As Hawaii-based insurer DTRIC expands its commercial lines in the second half of the year, it is doing so with a newly built service-oriented architecture-based policy administration system that allows it to pick and choose features from its existing legacy technology.
DTRIC established itself in Hawaii in 1992 at a time when many insurers began pulling [...]

The insurance industry is under increasing short-term pressure. It faces growing competition from non-traditional competitors and must satisfy an investing public, increasingly aware of the ever-expanding number of investment options. In step with these pressures, the industry has evolved to develop products that are more complex and offer more aggressive returns.
This shift is putting new [...]