Windows in Financial Services

As the global regulatory climate continues to change rapidly, European financial institution KAS Bank is moving all of its back-office operations - including those related to helping other banks with compliance - from the mainframe to a Microsoft .NET environment.
First established in 1808, KAS Bank specializes in wholesale securities services.
With total migration to Windows set [...]

Banca Transilviania, one of the top five leading banks in Romania, has seen a 30 percent increase in call center productivity after implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The bank also has lower cost of operations, while achieving increased customer satisfaction and retention.
Banca Transilvania’s retail division relies on its [...]

How technology, data, and analytics have protected credit cards from a financial storm.
At the beginning of the year, articles and news reports were already warning about an impending credit card crunch, with the suggestion that the credit card industry would fall to a fate similar to the mortgage industry. It didn’t happen. That doesn’t [...]

Bruce Livesay, the new CIO at First Horizon, has a history of finding the right solutions to challenges and achieving a competitive edge besides. The former IT head at Regions Bank, Livesay won last year’s WFS awards for his innovation deploying advanced Microsoft technologies. Then, faced with a merger with AmSouth Bank that would create [...]

Not so long ago, compiling peer group reports was a manually intensive process for CenterState Bank, the
lead bank for CenterState Banks of Florida. Since implementing Web-based software from Highline Financial, the bank has more data and faster access to it. Not only has it been a huge time saver, but also the bank has significantly [...]

The financial services institutions that survived the credit crisis’ first wave of casualties are reassessing their risk management practices. Windows in Financial Services spoke with Sai Sireesh Pachava, director of risk and compliance for Microsoft’s Worldwide Financial Services, to hear his perspective on what caused the crisis and what companies can do to protect themselves.
WFS: [...]

In order to successfully cope with the current economic downturn and credit crisis, banks must implement innovative strategies that extract the most out of existing resources. In particular, they must collaborate closely with their vendors to find the right mix of technology, products and services that will help them through these difficult times and prepare [...]

The downturn has led in many cases to increased investments in risk management and the computing power needed to fully understand the risks. Lloyds TSB is no exception. At a Microsoft conference Sept. 22, the company unveiled its “overnight HPC,” which it says has already led to a 50 percent performance improvement as well as [...]

Since its founding in 2001, Georgian Bank has become one of the fastest-growing banks with more than $2 billion in assets.
According to Danny W. Jett, executive vice president of the bank, this has a lot to do with the institution’s high-touch customer service. “Our objective is to be a different and better banking alternative for [...]

Banks are facing economic pressure and must cut costs, but in order to remain competitive, they also have to plan for tomorrow, meeting the next-generation demands of increasingly sophisticated customers. To hear about the potential of one of the newest technologies, surface computing, Windows in Financial Services spoke with Marley Gray, Microsoft’s industry technology strategist [...]