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Articles from
April 2006
Vendor Night Out: Take a Regulator to Dinner |
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Vendors don’t like to talk about it publicly, but they do love a technology initiative that is mandatory and has a fixed deadline. Y2K was a good example, and they could talk about it freely since the imposing target date was the result of old applications with their two-digit year designations and the relentless march of the calendar. It was just a real force of nature.
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Wealth Management: In Need of an Integration Lab |
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A step outside of the world of insurance, wealth management and customer relationship management provides a textbook example of how multiple applications from different sectors of financial services need to work together to meet customer needs. A client looking for financial guidance should not have to run from bank to brokerage to insurance agency collecting information to create his own profile. Technology should be able to pull that information together from disparate sources, develop a comprehensive view of the client, and store the information so a financial advisor can access it through a CRM application.
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The International Insurance Picture |
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Leading insurance carriers around the world want to aalign their business and IT in ways that can transform their companies, said Dennis Maroney, Microsoft’s worldwide insurance industry manager. Companies are looking both for new core systems and for ways to reduce costs and improve agility by moving some applications from mainframes to Intel-based servers running Microsoft Windows Server.
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Starting Motion |
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Microsoft created much of the methodology in Motion for its own use in software development, said Ron Savoia, US solutions director – financial services group at Microsoft.
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Monitoring Rates to Improve Profitability |
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“Why pay more than necessary?” asks Mike Schoeffler, founder of Profitdesk Software. The Piscataway, NJ-based company uses sophisticated models in Microsoft-based SmartRate deposit pricing software to find banks' most profitable rates. Schoeffler believes a typical bank will see 10 basis points of improvement – a $100 billion bank could add $100 million to earnings.
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Three New Microsoft Partner Program Appointments |
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David Littlewood, managing director of the global financial services group at Microsoft, has announced three new appointments to the worldwide team. The three have been named business development managers with responsibility for the partnerships with 11 independent software vendors who will be managed on a global basis.
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Algorithmic Trading, Regulations Push Order Management Systems to New Heights |
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It’s been a busy year for the companies that develop trade order management systems. Between algorithmic trading, regulatory initiatives and compliance issues, mutual funds and hedge funds have found that automating their trade flow has become a business requirement. Thanks in part to sales to the hedge fund industry, the trade order management business is growing in the US, and it’s growing in Europe and Asia as well.
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Mainframe Migration: Today, It’s All About Choice |
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The world’s banking and financial systems are built on mainframe technology – more than 75% of all banking transactions pass through a mainframe at some point – and the mainframe occupies this prized position for a number of very good reasons.
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Atlas Venture Takes Hybrid Approach to Faster Reporting |
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“They all do the same things differently.” So says Greg Woolf, CEO of Vantage Reporting, explaining the challenge he faced in developing software for private investment firms. He turned to a combination of software modules and customization, all based on Microsoft .NET.
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Schwab Directs Profitability Analysis Toward the Small Picture |
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By 2003, Charles Schwab’s 11-year old home-grown profitability program was bogging down. The company’s mix of business had grown more complex, volumes had risen sharply, and the software could not keep pace with either the rising complexity or the increasingly sophisticated requirements of internal users. Poor integration meant the profitability team was spending too much on data processing at the expense of analysis, and by the time reports were produced they were nearly six weeks old.
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RLI Embraces .NET to Transform into a Real-Time Enterprise |
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Founded 40 years ago to provide insurance for contact lenses, a concept that seems quaint in an era of disposable lenses, RLI (shortened from its original Replacement Lens Insurance) hasn’t stood still. Whether by necessity or market wisdom, the Peoria, IL-based carrier has adeptly restructured its business over the years to provide insurance to niche areas that have been underserved by larger players.
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Predicting How Changes in the Economy Will Impact Credit Card Debts |
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When a major international bank bought a large North American finance company, there were concerns the finance company would take its new parent into risky lending where it had little experience. Investor fears were calmed by the finance company's use of software from Santa Fe-based Strategic Analytics, which predicted bad debt provisions accurately and explained recent performance.
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New System Lets Capitol Indemnity Give More Power to Agents |
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Capitol Indemnity Corp. in Middleton, WI, had been using the AQS commercial policy administration system since the days when it ran on green screens in MS-DOS. So when the software vendor came out with AQS/advantage running on Windows, making the move to the new system was a natural.
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Giving Insurers Tools, Not Toys |
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David S. Platt teaches about .NET, Web services, ACORD XML and other Microsoft related topics through his education and consulting practice, Rolling Thunder Computing. He also teaches a course on programming .NET at Harvard University. He is one of Microsoft’s “Software Legends” and has written eight programming books, with three more on the way. His next book, “Why Software Sucks” from Addison-Wesley, is due out in the summer of 2006.
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Attention Financial Developers: New Release Makes Excel Enterprise-Ready and Available as a Service |
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Excel is the most widely used tool in financial services, but it has its limitations. Designed for the desktop, it often gets turned into a trading engine. As one industry expert noted, almost every trading strategy is launched in Excel. At some point it should move to a trading application, but it isn’t clear how often that happens and how often traders just keep using it directly. As a desktop application, Excel lacks audit trails and data security.
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EDS SOLCORP’s INGENIUM Policy Administration System Migrated to Microsoft .NET Framework with Micro Focus Lift and Shift™ |
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In April 2004 Micro Focus and Microsoft announced the creation of a new alliance, the Mainframe Migration Alliance, to enable the migration of critical proprietary mainframe systems onto the Microsoft Windows operating system using Microsoft .NET technology. Laying the technology foundation to move application workloads from the mainframe to more modern Intel architecture and the Windows Server platform, the alliance’s mission has been to help customers reduce the high cost of maintaining and modernizing their aging mainframe applications.
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HP Solves the Challenges of Legacy Environments with an Adaptive Enterprise Solution Down Under |
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HP has carved out a niche for itself in application modernization, and specifically now in legacy mainframe application modernization. When undertaking such work, it’s essential to focus on the entire environment – not just a single application – and it’s what HP has been doing for years. According to Richard Holling, director, insurance sector, financial services at HP, "In the 1990's, modernization meant mainly transitioning onto UNIX platforms, but in the last few years, we’ve seen a growing acceptance of Windows technology.”
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