Chubb Links Claims Operations to Auto Body Shops

Chubb Group of Insurance Companies has enhanced its Masterpiece Auto Preference Services program with the installation of a new auto claims dispatch platform that will electronically link Chubb to its network of auto body shops.

The platform, SceneAccess, from Rochester, NY-based Scene Genesis, Inc., will help expedite the claim settlement process. When a car is dropped off at a repair shop that is part of the Masterpiece Auto Preference Services program, all the information about the vehicle and the customer will be available through the shop’s computer system. Chubb created the Masterpiece Auto Preference Services program to provide its customers with referrals to quality auto repair shops, as well as priority auto glass replacement services and door-to-door rental car services.

www.chubb.com

www.scenegenesis.com

Microsoft and Partners Launch MiFID Initiative

Microsoft Corp. and its partners have launched a package of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) solutions. The solutions address eight key MiFID challenges: planning and testing; client classification; best execution; reporting; market connectivity; reference data and trade history; systematic internalization; and systems integration. The eight technology solutions can be offered as a complete package or as individual components.

Partners on the project include Aleri Labs, BearingPoint, C.O.S., Debug Software Tailoring, Fintecs, Gissing Software, HCL, HP, Progress Apama, Qumas, Rapid Addition, Singularity, SunGard, SuperDerivatives, TAP Solutions and Xenomorph.

Among the component solutions, software tools developed by the Fintecs team will play a key role in the area of “planning and testing” for MiFID compliance. Fintec’s MiFIDMap Workbench is a visual MiFID software tool developed specifically to show compliance officers at a glance the MiFID regulations, how they relate to their trading processes and how far their business processes are compliant.

SuperDerivatives will play a role in the area of “best execution” for OTC options. SuperDerivatives’ new Trade Price Auditor is a Web service that tracks in real time any executed trade in the dealing room and compares it with its current fair market price. Through online and mobile alerts as well as end-of-day audit trail reports, managers, controllers and regulators can quickly identify and take corrective action regarding pricing inaccuracies due to errors or fraud.

The Progress Software Corp.’s Progress Apama Event Processing Platform will provide Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) capabilities enabling firms to monitor and analyze their MiFID best execution compliance, as well as to meet the reporting, reference data and trade history requirements. The Aleri Streaming Platform will allow firms to analyze and act on continuously streaming high-frequency data in real time.

www.aleri.com

www.fintecs.com

www.progress.com

www.superderivatives.com

CheckFree and Corillian, Together Again

When CheckFree announced on Valentine’s Day that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Corillian Corp., the announcement signaled the coming together of two companies very familiar to Microsoft-friendly banks. It also symbolized the formal union of two firms whose histories have been intertwined since Corillian’s founding in 1997. 

For those interested in a little history, Ted F. Spooner founded Corillian in April of 1997. But from Sept. 1995 until April of  1997, he was senior vice president of Internet services for…CheckFree.  And prior to that he was CEO of a company he had founded called Interactive Solutions Corp., which in 1994 had been acquired by…CheckFree. 

Furthermore, Kirk H. Wright, who started as Corillian’s vice president of marketing and sales the month after its founding and became the company’s president just two months later, had come to Corillian from CheckFree, where he was director of Internet services, Internet marketing and strategy. Other CheckFree veterans who were Corillian pioneers include Terrence Ishida, who joined as vice president of development in 1997 and became CTO two years later, and Jay N. Whipple III, who became a director of Corillian in the fall of 1997 after serving as executive vice president and vice chairman of CheckFree, according to a 2000 Corillian Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The filing lists Check-Free as Corillian’s primary partner for remittance processing. 

The combination of the two companies is intended to provide tighter integration of electronic banking, billing, payment and service support functionality. 

“In terms of seamless integration we have a big advantage in having worked with them on a majority of their implementations already,” said Pete Kight, CheckFree chairman and CEO, in the conference call announcing the acquisition. An understatement,
to be sure.

www.checkfree.com

www.corillian.com

SunGard’s Latest Acquisition Spree

SunGard has announced three acquisitions in recent months in the hedge fund, wealth management and Chinese financial markets.

In November it announced the acquisition of Integrated Business Systems, Inc. (IBSI), a Melville, NY-based provider of software solutions and related services to hedge funds. IBSI’s primary product is Visual Portfolio Manager (VPM), a portfolio accounting solution whose functionality also includes trade processing and reporting. SunGard will continue to position VPM as a portfolio accounting solution for use by managers of hedge funds and as complementary to SunGard’s existing applications for the hedge fund industry including FRONT ARENA, Monis, InvestOne Enterprise, and InvesTier.

In December, SunGard acquired Shanghai Fudan Kingstar Computer Co., Ltd (“Kingstar”), a leading provider of software and processing solutions in China that will help SunGard expand its product offering and business operations in China. Kingstar has a focus on financial services solutions for exchange management, futures trading, securities trading, gold trading, brokerage management, data warehousing, and campus and smart card solutions for higher education.

Also in December, SunGard acquired Automated Financial Systems Corporation (AFS), a leading provider of front-office products for financial institutions. AFS will become part of SunGard’s WealthStation wealth management technology solution. AFS solutions include the Investpoint broker workstation, Investor and Active Trader retail trading tools, Infostream streaming market data, and the Correspondent Clearing Portal.

SunGard is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

www.sungard.com

Microsoft Takes Hard Line on Phishers

Microsoft is helping law enforcement track phishers and has already brought 129 lawsuits against individuals suspected of stealing bank account data in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region as part of an effort to crack down on illegal phishing scams.

Microsoft launched its Global Phishing Enforcement Initiative in EMEA in March of last year. These latest results were announced by Nancy Anderson, deputy general counsel at the software company, at an EU conference on identity theft in Brussels late last year.

Of the 129 lawsuits that have been initiated, 97 are criminal procedures. The rest of the cases are civil suits against teenagers that will generally be settled out of court. In EMEA, most of the investigations and 50 of the criminal charges were brought in Turkey. The UK led the civil orders with 18 out of a total 32. Microsoft can initiate lawsuits even when it is not the target of identity theft because legal systems in many countries allow anyone suffering from attacks to claim damages.

Latest INDATA Version Includes Mobile and ASP Modules

The latest release of INDATA’s enterprise investment management system, IMS Version 7, includes the release of INDATA Mobile, IMS ASP and INDATA SA (system administrator).

Through INDATA Mobile, a new product based on the Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system, IMS users can now benefit from seamless integration with wireless devices. INDATA Mobile offers remote access to InContact, INDATA’s Web-based CRM module; Precision Trading, INDATA’s trade order management system, and IMS Back Office & Reports, INDATA’s portfolio accounting system.

IMS ASP is a new version of the company’s enterprise software product that is fully hosted by INDATA.

Meanwhile, for in-house clients, INDATA SA provides the ability to outsource the administration of their IMS application, with INDATA staff maintaining and verifying key system procedures and functions.

www.indataweb.com

Research Note: MiFID, Reg NMS to Increase Dark Pools

A TABB Group research note titled, “Liquidity Management: Pushing Automated Trading Beyond Agency Brokerage” projects that Reg NMS in the U.S. and MiFID in Europe will make it more challenging and risky to execute equities using more traditional internalization techniques over the next five years. As a result, equity internalization rates will shift and more order flow will be matched in dark pools.

“Once dark pools become more entrenched, a greater amount of product innovation will begin to occur,” states the report, co-authored by TABB Group research analyst Matt Simon and Larry Tabb, TABB Group founder and CEO.

The research note, which details liquidity management as well as projecting this trend, is available online currently through the Web site of Microsoft partner Smart Trade Technologies, whose smartTrade Studio front-end offering is built on Microsoft.

www.smart-trade.net

www.tabbgroup.com

Goldman Sachs Offers Connotate to Global Investor Clients

Goldman Sachs has invested in a .NET-based solution for intelligent content mining and has entered into a joint marketing agreement to offer the solution to its global investor client base. The solution, Information Agent Suite (IAS) from Connotate Technologies, uses intelligent information agents to gather and aggregate updates or changes in information on key Web sites that a user chooses to monitor, without the need for complex programming.

“When we showed this to Goldman Sachs they shared what a great need there is for tools for managing and gathering research data and they said ‘it’s an arms race,’” said Bruce Molloy, CEO and chairman of Connotate Technologies.

Goldman Sachs managing director Michael Sanders confirmed that the firm saw the product as a strong fit for global investor clients. “We believe that Connotate’s product offerings will have broad applicability across our global investor client base,” he said. “We are currently witnessing an intense race among investment firms to obtain more primary, specialized research and tools.”

The tool allows users to assign agents to sites they want to monitor and the agents alert the users whenever the data on those sites changes or new information appears. As a research aggregation tool, the agents can streamline information from sites with varied formats into a uniform format, enabling users to quickly compare apples to apples. The agents can populate the data into an Excel spreadsheet or a database and the data is easily assembled into charts or graphs.

The IAS is built on the premise that the main question analysts and investors ask as they search the Web for information on companies and products is “What’s changed?” according to Molloy.

www.connotate.com

www.goldmansachs.com

Spreadsheet Compliance is the New Black

At least three spreadsheet compliance solutions debuted in the first quarter.

Following a nine-month research project and pilot implementation at three large banks, India’s HCL Technologies and Microsoft have released a series of tools based on Excel Services. The tools are designed to alleviate the regulatory burden on financial institutions by ensuring greater control and clarity on data, informing risk reporting, derivatives processing, performance measurement and collateral management. The tools use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to allow users to manipulate centrally-stored spreadsheets using a Web-browser.

Not to be outdone, Prodiance Corporation announced the Prodiance Spreadsheet Compliance Edition for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007. The product leverages many of the controls for spreadsheets already found in SharePoint. To those it adds Prodiance Link Migration Manager, an application that migrates spreadsheets from uncontrolled desktops into controlled SharePoint 2007 repositories while automatically updating any embedded links; Prodiance Spreadsheet IQ, an add-in for Excel that automates spreadsheet discovery, inventory, and risk-based analysis, among other controls; and Prodiance Spreadsheet Compliance Manager, a Web service for Excel that audits critical spreadsheets for better tracking of key performance and risk indicators.

And SpreadsheetGear LLC announced the availability of SpreadsheetGear for .NET 2006 v. 2.5, and Excel compatible spreadsheet component. It features an Excel compatible calculation engine and Windows Forms Spreadsheet Controls. It adds to earlier versions, cell comments, data validation, pictures, text boxes, form controls, autoshapes and other features enabling developers to create richer and easier to use applications.

www.hcltech.com

www.prodiance.com

www.spreadsheetgear.com

Metavante Duplicate Detection Hits Lightning Speed

Metavante Corp., the banking and payments technology subsidiary of Marshall & Ilsley Corp., has introduced VECTOR: Duplicate Detection with uniquely high speeds.

The solution identifies duplicate payments that originate from any point of capture – whether by accident or deliberate intent. It can support up to 3.6 billion items at speeds in excess of 50,000 items per second.

A white paper released in December from the CheckImage Collaborative, a working group co-sponsored by the Electronic Check ClearingHouse Organization (ECCHO) and the Retail Payments Office of the Federal Reserve of Atlanta, noted check duplication as a growing problem since the introduction of the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act.

“The introduction of substitute checks into the collection process sometimes results in duplicate payments,” the paper stated. “There are a number of duplicate payment scenarios through multiple payment channels that are the result of unintentional processing errors or fraudulent activities.”

With VECTOR: Duplicate Detection, financial institutions can reduce the high cost of back-office research, adjustments and the correction of duplicate payments and double postings. It is also an effective fraud prevention system.

Texas-based Frost Bank has already implemented the Metavante system.

“With so many avenues for duplication, both deliberate and unplanned, a comprehensive duplicate detection solution needs to look at payments from all points of capture quickly and effectively,” said Dave Rathke, senior vice president, Frost Bank.

www.metavante.com

www.frostbank.com

Survey: Data Silo Integration is Still Manual

Manual efforts remain the dominant approach for integration of data silos, according to the results of a survey released in March. The survey of 407 senior IT decision makers found that 87 percent of respondents rely on newly developed code to integrate data, while 80 percent still manually change schemas as required.

The survey was conducted by Forrester Research and commissioned by Microsoft Partner Progress Software Corporation. While the percentages will slightly decrease over the next two years, manual processes will continue to trump automation.

The survey also found that a SOA-based approach is gaining ground quickly; while 44 percent of enterprises use SOA today, 59 percent of respondents reported that they plan to use SOA for integration efforts over the next two years.

www.forrester.com

www.progress.com

SAP-SWIFT Integration to be Available Mid-2007

A tool stemming from a partnership between SAP and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) that is intended to save companies the cost of managing a multitude of separate communication channels for each bank relationship is expected to be released mid-year.

The SAP Integration Package for SWIFT is a standardized software solution that will link SAP ERP solutions directly to SWIFTNet, the IP-based messaging platform connecting nearly 8,000 financial institutions in 206 countries and territories. According to SAP, the average costs per year for proprietary bank interfaces exceeds 25,000 euros per year per connection and companies maintaining upwards of 10 banking relationships.

SAP Integration Package for SWIFT is being designed to enable companies to access multiple banks through a single connection for real-time exchange of payment and settlement messages via SWIFTNet. The software is being architected with pre-configured message and process mapping between the application interfaces and business logic of the SAP Financial Supply Chain Management application, mySAP ERP Financials and the SWIFT infrastructure.

The tool will be released with the next enhancement package for mySAP ERP 2005. Also available in the next enhancement package for mySAP ERP 2005, the SAP Bank Relationship Management will help managers increase internal controls and increase productivity by introducing straight-through processing more widely.

www.sap.com

www.swift.com