Fidelity Targets Balance Between Technology and Personal Attention

Thomson Financial has signed a multi-year alliance with Microsoft to further optimize its PORTIA portfolio management system for the Microsoft platform. This alliance will deliver middle- to back-office solutions for the worldwide financial community built using the latest Microsoft technology, including the Microsoft .NET Framework and Windows Server System.

That’s good news for ING Investment Management, which has recently moved its PORTIA operations to Microsoft and Intel.

“We have been migrating all our products to Microsoft where we can,” explained Brian Oaks, AVP of the Information Technology, Systems Administration group at ING Investment Management. By optimizing PORTIA on the Microsoft platform, Thomson will enable customers to increase the strategic value of their IT investments while reducing complexity and cost.

“We do financial management and use PORTIA as our central back-office system,” said Oaks. Trading is done on three front-office systems for equities, fixed income and money markets. The transactions are reformatted and sent back to PORTIA which acts as the repository for all ING Investment Management’s accounts.

Coast Asset Management, a $5 billion group of funds in Santa Monica, CA, runs its entire operations on Microsoft technology and Dell servers.

“We once looked at an application that was attractive, but it ran on Solaris and we didn’t want to acquire a whole additional set of expertise,” said Richard Grossman, VP of Applications Operations at Symphony FSG, which operates the information technology department for Coast.

By using the latest versions of Microsoft software, from Windows XP SP2 on the desktops to Windows Server 2003, and maintaining a set of standards for implementation, the firm keeps complexity and costs low and performance high.

When clients of JPMorgan’s Eu-ropean Credit Department get out of a meeting or return to the office after lunch, they can get a quick view of what the market’s been doing by glancing at CreditMap on their desktop.

Built on Panopticon’s heat mapping technology, CreditMap integrates live pricing, historical pricing, credit research, and online trading.

“It’s very good if you come back from a meeting and want to see what’s going on in the marketplace,” explained Silvio Oliviero, who is in charge of European eMarketing (fixed income) at JPMorgan Securities in London. “Through the heatmap they can easily visualize the market by sector, maturities or individual issues that are active.”

For accountants and other financial professionals who need to produce information such as quarterly and annual reports in XBRL, Rivet Software of Denver has developed Dragon Tag XBRL. A Microsoft Office-based solution, Dragon Tag offers users the ability to drag an XBRL tag to data in a report.

By leveraging Microsoft Office, Rivet’s Dragon Tag provides accounting and finance professionals with a user-friendly application to both extend XBRL taxonomies and create XBRL documents based on existing Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel documents. It can be used for regulatory reporting, investor relations, and internal financial information distribution.

“With Dragon Tag, I can drag and drop XBRL information onto your existing data,” explained Rob Blake, vice president of product marketing at Rivet. The first time an accountant prepares a quarterly report it might take six to 10 hours. But the tags then stay on the report, and the next time he can just change the data and make the report XBRL-ready in minutes.

EDGAR Online and its I-Metrix Suite of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) products can be used with Microsoft Office System technology to streamline financial reporting and reduce manual data entry and validation. To help companies understand how to use XBRL, Microsoft features EDGAR Online and Rivet Software in an Office Solutions site that includes a video to demonstrate how reporting and analysis can be automated.

Just as we get our hands around one threat to the security of corporate infrastructure, e.g. phishing, it mutates into something new, e.g. spear phishing. Each new mode of attack brings its own challenges, but after 20 years of on-line computer securities problems, have we learned anything at all? Is the situation so complicated and fluid that we are doomed to eventual failure? Probably not, and the fact that, after this much time, we have an expanding interconnected ecosystem suggests that we are actually doing pretty well overall.

Microsoft has reorganized its financial services sales organization and added positions for more industry experts to bring both industry expertise and technical expertise to a larger number of banks, brokerages, and insurance companies.

“This is a new enterprise selling model,” explained Tracy Issel, general manager for financial services in North America. “We have organized so we can get the right resource to the right customer at the right time.”

To accomplish this, Microsoft is adding 10 percent to its field sales staff in three primary areas – consistent customer relationship teams, deeper industry expertise, and deeper technical specialization.

Fujitsu has been committed to 64-bit computing for years. This year has been a particularly busy one, with the launch of the Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST server line in April, and supporting advances in software and services to further smooth the transition of mission critical applications toward a 64-bit environment.

Intel has been working with financial vendors in applying 64-bit computing since as far back as the late 1990s. This year, the company continued forward with several announcements related to 64-bit computing, including the availability of five new 64-bit processors with Intel® Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel EM64T). With the introduction of the Intel Celeron® D processor 351, Intel has completed the transformation of its entire desktop and server product lines to 64-bit computing capability.

HP has offered 64-bit computing since the late 90s. Over the past 15 years it has expanded 64-bit computing throughout its enterprise computer line. We connected with Chip E. Greenlee, III, HP’s director of marketing and solutions for the financial services industries, to get the company’s view on why 64-bit has become mainstream for the financial industry’s business-critical and data-intensive applications.

Welcome to the first annual experience Financial Services Innovator Awards. The five vendors and four financial firms spotlighted on the pages that follow have all demonstrated innovative approaches to using Microsoft technology to transform a segment of the financial industry – whether it be banking, finance or insurance. And the prime beneficiary of these transformations can be summed up with one acronym – C.E.O. No, not the chief executive, but customers, employees and operations.

Mass affluent.

Does this conjure up images of throngs in designer-chic Mao suits parading down broad boulevards holding aloft sleek wireless PDAs through which they access their investment accounts?

An awkward term, it is used to categorize clients, or potential clients, with $250,000 to $1 million of investable assets – enough money to warrant attention but nowhere near enough to justify a private banker.

Curiously enough, even though it is an all-Internet bank, Atlanta-based $2.5 billion NetBank also uses AdviceAmerica as a way to link customers with financial advisors.

Peter Rossi, the director of wealth management at NetBank and a former financial advisor, sees the value of AdviceAmerica in its efficiency and its flexibility.

The first couple of meetings between an advisor and client are getting acquainted time while the advisor tries to get an idea of the client’s financial picture. Eventually, when he has enough information, the advisor goes back to the office and enters the data into a tool. With AdviceAmerica, the client does that work, and when he is ready to talk with an advisor – and NetBank encourages this personal contact over its Web site – the information is all there for the advisor to see. A large percentage of NetBank customers use the planning tool without an advisor, but Rossi believes the personal contact will build loyalty, if the client will agree.

Wealth management starts with the gathering and management of complex information held in a number of different systems, information about the clients, financial plans, and investment products. It often requires collaborating, internally sharing information within the firm, tracking advice provided to clients, ensuring regulatory compliance and storing information so it is readily available to auditors. Following are some recent examples of leading firms that have used Microsoft technology to present information where and when it is needed to support employees and satisfy customers. Links to the full case study follow each description.

Ten thousand baby boomers are retiring in the US each day – an incredible opportunity for financial firms, according to Mark Halverson, a partner in the capital markets practice at Accenture.

Bruce Holley, vice president in the New York office of The Boston Consulting Group, leads the firm’s wealth management practice in North America. At BCG he has focused on improving profitability through better pricing and a small accounts model for a high-end trust bank. In his role at BCG he has also worked with a major investment bank to improve the effectiveness of its high net worth sales force. Prior to BCG, Holley was a vice president at JPMorgan in New York.

What’s the most common problem you see in firms’ approaches to wealth management?

Typically people in wealth management are part of a larger organization that services different segments, so they need to decide whom they are servicing and then look at their cost and capability. You don’t want to have someone who is very expensive focusing on a lower wealth segment; it is important to align the right model with the right client segment based on the revenue potential. The other problem I see is that clients have problems and want solutions, while firms too often are just selling product. They say here is a mutual fund, or a loan, or a deposit.

On the phone with my attorney’s assistant a few months ago to prepare for the next day’s closing on a condominium, I suddenly realized my calculations were $20,000 off. Looking for a source of quick funds without penalties for early withdrawal, I called Fidelity, where I have an IRA. …