From the Editor:

A 64-bit .NET-based pricing and risk management engine running on a 64-bit Windows Compute Cluster Server in UniCredit’s Markets & Investment Banking Division has achieved quick time-to-market for structured derivatives products. Through an integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, EDS SOLCORP’s WealthServ will combine the valuable customer data it houses for compliance, commissions, customer service and unified customer portfolio statements with wide-ranging CRM capabilities for an enhanced sales and customer service platform for insurance agents or investment representatives. A comprehensive enterprise-class spreadsheet compliance solution brings control, auditability and error analysis to business critical spreadsheets distributed across an organization in part by facilitating the management of spreadsheets in the SharePoint environment.

These are just a few examples of the ways customers and partners are leveraging the latest and most advanced Microsoft technologies to increase operational efficiency, enhance customer service, and improve overall competitiveness. There are seven other winners that we have picked whose forward-thinking approach to advanced technologies has raised the bar in terms of making their own firms, or their clients, more competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment.

It was hard to narrow down the field to ten winners, particularly at a time when Microsoft is making increasing strides in all facets of the financial industry, from banking to insurance to capital markets. Less Microsoft-focused magazines than ours are recognizing this shift – this year even Institutional Investor took notice, adding Microsoft’s capital markets director Craig Saint-Amour to its Online Top 40, and noting that the days that Wall Street was the domain of Oracle databases running on Sun servers are no more. In our annual Innovator Awards section, now in its third year, read about ten firms whose particularly innovative work in harnessing the power of Microsoft technology to further their growth and build on their business successes makes them stand-outs in their respective sectors of the financial services industry.

Meanwhile, as the financial industry gears up for SWIFT’s Sibos conference in Boston, there is a huge drive toward automated connectivity and straight-through processing in the world of payments, spurred in part by the planned 2010 launch in Europe of the Single European Payments Area (SEPA), which aims to make cross-border transactions as cheap as domestic ones. We have asked four experts to share their thoughts on challenges such as industry standards, cost and connectivity that firms face as they drive their payments efforts toward increased efficiency.

Finally, Microsoft is reaching out in many areas, not only to the massive, multi-national financial firms that demand enterprise class products, but to the entrepreneurs launching startup firms, whose business visions may still exist largely on paper napkins. In partnership with firms such as Bank of America, MasterCard and FedEx, Microsoft is developing a long list of tools to help entrepreneurial firms access and manage the funds to grow their businesses – and perhaps fuel tomorrow’s innovations.

- Renee Wijnen Caruthers