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Articles from
June 2007
Building the first generation OMS-EMS |
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 Is the market ready for a combined order management-execution management system?
As David Quinlan, president of Eze Castle Software tells it, when BNY ConvergEx was formed last summer, bringing together assets from BNY Securities Group and Eze Castle into an independent company, the foundation was laid for a deep integration of trading assets.
The deal brought together different elements of the investment process ranging from research, commission management, and liquidity management, to Eze Castle’s order management system (OMS).
“These elements had been standalone, and are now converging into sets of services and technologies to meet the needs of the future,” Quinlan says. “There is a trend to bring more tools onto the desktop and clients are looking to converge these tools onto one application, like an OMS-EMS platform. We tried to do this years ago through partnerships, but found one critical problem with partnerships: you don’t own the source code. We realized that if we wanted to do something different, we had to go beyond forming a new partnership or a leasing agreement. There had to be a singular ownership structure of the key assets.”
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News Briefs |
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 Data Connection: A Look at the Future Thomson-Reuters- Lab49 Creates Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation Practice
 Metavante Gains Independence- Liquidnet Acquires Miletus Trading
 Fidelity Buys Asset Control
Which Buys TAP Solutions
News from ACORD LOMA
 Microsoft Assists in
Developments of ACORD Insurance Capability Model- Exstream Introduced
Dialogue Live for Agents in the Field
- Progressive Migrates Mainframe-based Policy Management to
Microsoft, Speeds Service
- New Capgemini Global
Insurance Team Serves Six of Largest Global
Insurers
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Online Banking: Embraced by Consumers - The Next Steps |
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 By all accounts online banking is a mature channel. With some studies showing that over a third of American households are using their financial institution’s online banking capabilities, the big question is what is next?
Security is certainly top of mind for everyone, and compliance is an ongoing priority for financial services firms. From a functionality angle, progressive institutions are looking for ways to enrich the experience for their users, cross sell products and services, and deepen customer loyalty. This forum provides our industry leaders with the opportunity to discuss the latest trends in online banking and how they will affect both consumers and financial institutions.
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People on the Move |
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- Don Canning Emerges in Insurance
- Koen Van den Brande Becomes Microsoft’s CTO for EMEA Financial Services
- Hurdis Heads
Metavante’s Expanded Image Solutions
- Cosentino and
Chalmers Join
Symbility Solutions
- Misys Makes Changes, Adds Three New Execs
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Duet Brings New Ease-of-Use to Enterprise Applications |
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 Microsoft and SAP have answered the prayers of millions of business
end users who wanted to leverage the power of SAP business applications
through the intuitive interface of their Microsoft desktop.
Duet, a jointly-developed solution, enables business users to access
SAP applications like time and expense management, budgeting, travel
management, as well as business intelligence applications directly via
Microsoft Office.
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Leaders Forum: From Risk to Reward - How to Profit from IT Security |
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 Competitive pressures have slowly been forcing financial services
institutions to manage security issues proactively rather than
reactively even as security threats and compliance demands multiply and
grow in complexity. An increase in data leakage, for instance, is
forcing institutions to employ new strategies even as the challenge
remains defining and implementing the security measures that can
deliver business improvements and increased profit. We ask industry
leaders to tell us what financial institutions need to do this year.
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Killing the Element of Surprise in the Mortgage Market |
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 Harold Geneen, the famous CEO of ITT of the 1960s, believed that
“ninety-nine percent of all surprises in business are negative.” If
something unexpected happened, he assumed that “…management had not
anticipated or planned properly.”
Michael Bykhovsky, CEO and president of Applied Financial Technology
(AFT) headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Boston and New
York agrees. “If the recent rise in defaults of sub-prime mortgages
were unexpected by the companies that granted them, or by CMO
(collateralized mortgage obligations) investors, someone was clearly
not doing his job,” he says.
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Microsoft Offers Cover Beneath MiFID Umbrella |
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   If it turns out as the soothsayers predict, the introduction of the
European Union’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID)
will bring the most comprehensive changes to Europe’s capital markets
arena yet seen. As Ian Warford, industry director for securities and
capital markets at Microsoft EMEA, Financial Services, puts it: “MiFID
is really like the Big Bang for Europe.”
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Major Exchanges Make the Migration from the Mainframe to Microsoft |
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 Coping with continual growth in market data volumes and keeping pace
with the speed to today’s markets are among the driving forces
propelling exchanges to continually invest in technology that will
deliver the flexibility, scalability, security, performance and
availability that exchanges demand. To meet these needs some of the
world’s largest exchanges are beginning to migrate away from their
mainframe environments and move onto Microsoft platforms. From South
America, to Europe, to the US, exchanges such as Bovespa, The Pacific
Exchange, now part of NYSE Arca, the London Stock Exchange and EuroNext
have selected the Microsoft platform for mission-critical processes.
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Out-of-The-Box Back End Gives Marquis Bank an Easy Debut |
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 Like in many US regions, the local banks in North Miami Beach have all but disappeared, having been acquired by their larger rivals. But some of the area’s veteran bankers believe that industry consolidation has left a gap in the market for a community bank that caters to commercial customers, including small businesses. That is the rationale behind the formation of Marquis Bank (IO), which will open the doors of its first branch in summer 2007.
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Canadian Title Insurer Creates Customizable Portal To Aid Lenders, Partners |
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 In the highly competitive world of mortgage services, companies can
gain a keen competitive advantage among lenders, other partners, and
prospective property buyers simply by making it easier to do business.
That’s one of two big reasons why First Canadian Title (FCT), a major
provider of real estate title insurance, decided to implement a Web
portal based on the latest technology from Microsoft and systems
integrator Avanade.
But FCT’s new portal, known as the Integrated Lending Solution, will
also cut costs by paring down the amount of time spent on business
process transactions, according to Sam Dotson, chief information
officer of the Mississauga, Ontario-based firm.
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Prudential Real Estate and Relocation Consolidates Web Architectures |
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 The real estate and relocation businesses of Prudential Real Estate
and Relocation Services are distinct from each other in several ways.
But there is no reason that their Web site IT architectures have to be.
That’s one of the first things David Quine noticed when he joined PRERS
as a technical architect in the fall of 2005. At the time, the two
businesses had 13 Web sites, interacting with 400 applications. Quine
and his team estimated 50 percent to 70 percent data replication.
“I saw right away here was an opportunity to cut,” Quine says.
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Enhancing the Advisor-Client Relationship in a Web 2.0 World: |
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 Stockgroup’s Collaborative Technologies for Investors
In a Web 2.0 age, it is not only speed, but meaningfully delivering
aggregated market data, news content and interactive Web services that
count. Many say they do this. Few do this well. Many brokerage firms
have invested in advisor technologies, and in technologies to enhance
the customer experience, but few have invested in technologies that
directly impact the advisor-client relationship.
A financial services technology provider that has led the pack is
Vancouver, BC-based Stockgroup, an online financial solutions provider
that has helped brokerages seriously differentiate their offerings to a
growing baby boomer population of affluent investors.
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Forex Meets .NET |
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 The Foreign Exchange, or Forex, market has been hot in recent years with a surge of new retail investors entering the market. Gain Capital Group, founded in 1999, has been servicing this growing interest through its two Web portals, Gain Capital, its service for professional traders, and Forex.com, Gain’s retail division for self-directed individual investors. The company recently launched a Microsoft-based next generation margin trading platform called FOREXTrader for Windows. We spoke to Andrew Haines, vice president of application development for Gain Capital Group about the new platform and the decision to launch it with Microsoft technology.
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Bring on the Juice! High-Performance Computing Feeds Wall Street’s Insatiable Appetite for Computational Power |
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  Enough is never enough. At least not for Wall Street. That applies
to almost any element of the business – profits, market share,
customers – you name it. There is also an insatiable appetite for
computational power and that’s where high-performance computing (HPC)
comes in. Financial Insights’ parent company, IDC, uses the term
high-performance computing to encompass the entire market for servers
used by scientists, engineers, analysts and others to run
computationally intensive modeling and simulation applications.
Technical computers range from small servers costing less than $5,000
to large-capability machines valued at tens or hundreds of millions of
dollars each. Wall Street IT licks its chops when it sees the chance to
significantly increase complexity and reduce latency, and HPC is
fertile ground for such innovation.
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Microsoft is Enabling Secure, Affordable HPC Solutions across the Enterprise |
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 According to Neil Cowit, New York-based HPC solution specialist for
Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003
provides a secure, cost-effective solution for the compute-intensive
requirements of financial services.
In a recent interview with Wall Street & Technology, Microsoft CEO
Steve Ballmer said, “The way in which performance gains are achieved on
computer chips has changed, creating a new challenge for HPC software.
For years, Intel just kept doubling, doubling, doubling clock speeds.
Now they don’t double clock speeds anymore – they give us twice as many
cores or processors. Figuring out how to take any application and
parallelize it so it can run across multiple cores will be a key, not
just in high-performance computing and not just in financial scenarios
but in all applications figuring out how to exploit the increase in
power that physics is giving us.”
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IBM Combines HPC Cluster Technology with Microsoft WCCS 2003 and Excel Server 2007 to Deliver ‘Game Changer’ Solutions |
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 IBM (www.ibm.com) recently announced a new focus on the
Departmental/Workgroup clusters market. For engineers, scientists and
IT professionals who use high-performance computing (HPC) applications,
IBM provides departmental and workgroup clusters. Available for Windows
Computer Cluster Server 2003, these clusters capitalize on IBM’s
extensive engineering, testing and deep-clustering experience,
utilizing IBM System x™ rack-optimized or IBM BladeCenter® servers for
extraordinary performance and reliability.
According to Stuart Alexander, IBM’s clusters worldwide marketing
manager, departmental and workgroup clusters, which are smaller, more
manageable and allow for more affordable HPC clustering solutions,
bring more compute power closer to users for greater productivity.
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Dell Delivers Entry-Level to Complete, End-to-End HPC Cluster Solutions Leveraging WCCS and Excel 2007 |
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 Kevin Noreen is senior manager at Dell (www.dell.com) for their Open
Systems Product Marketing that focuses on HPC. Acknowledged as a
visionary by his peers, he has been instrumental at Dell in identifying
emerging markets and trends, providing strategic direction, developing
leading partnerships as well as defining Dell’s future solution
products and delivery strategies. We asked him how he would respond to
the question that modeling and trading platforms have not always been
viewed as part of the traditional enterprise applications.
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Aleri Places High Priorities on Delivering Event-Processing Technology for High-Performance Computing |
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 With offices in the US and the UK, Aleri (www.aleri.com) specializes
in high performance event-processing technology that is being used to
power mission-critical applications within a number of the world’s
leading financial institutions. According to Don DeLoach, CEO at Aleri,
their Streaming Platform is “the leading enterprise class
event-processing technology” in terms of performance and versatility.
Designed from the ground up for high throughput with minimal latency,
it provides an industrial-strength engine that can address a wide
variety of event-processing needs in financial services.
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Keeping Up with the Ever Increasing Demands of Data Processing |
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 StreamBase Systems (www.streambase.com), a leader in the fast-growing
complex event processing (CEP) market, has pioneered a remarkable new
approach to processing and analyzing real-time streaming data. Founded
by data management experts who have been driving industry innovation
for decades and backed by top-tier investor firms, StreamBase has
developed a new class of stream processing software. Global
organizations are witnessing its high performance coupled with its
intuitive graphical development environment that eliminates the need
for costly, inflexible custom-coding.
We recently spoke with Barry Morris, Chairman and CEO of StreamBase
Systems, Inc. about high-performance CEP and the trends that are
driving its adoption in financial markets.
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ASPEED Turbocharges Financial Services Applications Using Intel’s Energy-Efficient Quad-Core Xeon CPUs |
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 ASPEED Software (www.aspeed.com), a Microsoft partner, enables firms
to rapidly upgrade their applications to fully exploit multi-core and
grid, significantly shortening response time. By adapting Windows- and
Linux-based single-thread desktop and server applications, explains
ASPEED’s CEO Kurt Ziegler, customers can take full advantage of
Intel-based multi-core platforms without major application surgery or
retooling. We recently caught up with Kurt just as he finished meeting
with Richard Dracott, general manager, high-performance computing group
at Intel (www.intel.com).
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Tyan’s PSC Series + Microsoft’s WCCS 2003 = High-Performance Personal Supercomputing |
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 According to Dr. T. Symon Chang, a former Intel and IBM executive
who founded Tyan Computer Corporation (www.tyanpsc.com), “yesterday’s
top 500 supercomputer can now be sitting right at the side of your
desk.” Recently, Tyan announced the availability of their TyanPSC T-600
series Personal Supercomputer featuring new Xeon quad-core server
processors from Intel. A fully integrated five-node cluster, the PSC
delivers computation capability while only requiring power from a
standard 15-amp wall outlet.
WFS: What is a PSC?...
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Developers Honored at Awards Ceremony |
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 The winners of the Windows in Financial Services Developer Awards,
announced in the last issue, received their awards at a ceremony during
a cocktail reception at the 5th Annual Microsoft Financial Services
Developer Conference in New York in April.
A quick recap, the award winners included Merrill Lynch with assistance
from Advantage Professionals for a data services framework that
delivers customer data to internal business users. The framework
determines data sources in real-time and in some cases accesses data
from several sources concurrently, and applies relevant business rules
to the data to execute data requests.
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Industry Roundtable: Technology Challenges Facing Prime Brokers in Dealing with the Buy-Side, Not for the Faint of Heart |
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 Industry experts discuss big changes afoot in the prime
brokerage world affecting the shape, size and scope of the buy- and
sell-side’s front- to back-office relationship.
The adoption of technology has brought (and continues to bring)
dramatic changes to the shape, size and scope of the buy- and sell-side
relationship from the front office to the back office. In the front
office, keeping up, interpreting and making faster and better trading
decisions is unlikely to get any easier. The influx of trading
technology has led many to question the role of the trader. Will they
be replaced by quick, super-efficient machines, or will the market
always demand the human touch and if so, what degree of touch will it
be?
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Smart Strategies for Competing in a Global Economy |
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 Regardless of their niche, line of business, or historical market sweet-spots, today all financial services businesses must have a strong grasp of the changing dynamics of the global economy - and their role within it. Whether they’re a boutique Boston investment management fi rm or an international commercial bank with branches in 80 countries, the ultimate context for their products, clients, and competition is unavoidably global.
As global vice president of Financial Services for CDC Software, Jason Rushforth deals daily with both the global nature of his business and the global challenges of his client companies, which include fi rms such as Mellon Asset Management, Calamos Investments, Allianz Dresdner Asset Management, and Farm Credit Services of America. CDC Software offers the Pivotal CRM suite of client relationship management systems for fi nancial services firms, which includes discrete tailored solutions for capital markets, mutual fund wholesaling, institutional asset management, wealth management, and commercial banking. We talked to Mr. Rushforth about the challenges of the global economy and how CRM can play a role in helping financial services firms compete.
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Firm’s “Timing Is Everything” Approach Leads to Spin-Off |
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 Garrett Capital’s philosophy is that when it comes to financial
markets, timing is everything. The investment advisory firm licenses
active management strategies of third-party managers for use in its
clients’ accounts. The challenge is finding the right third-party
managers.
As a proponent of active management, Garrett Capital adheres to the
strategy that indicators, typically generated by mathematical models,
can identify trends or changes in trends, and as a result can reduce
risk and improve returns. To better identify active managers who
successfully employed this strategy, in 1999 Garrett Capital began
tracking timing signals, or the buy and sell recommendations of
different third parties. What eventually resulted was TimerTrac, a
spin-off company that is now completely separate from Garrett Capital,
that tracks active signals for customers ranging from individual
investors, to advisors to academics.
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Stanford Federal Credit Union – Case Study |
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 Institution Profile
Tempering high-growth opportunities with
the necessary realities of doing business efficiently is helping
balance Stanford Federal Credit Union’s portfolio and technology
decisions.
While their banking counterparts are forced to fight
battles on many different fronts and spend energy and capital on
building with bricks and mortar, Stanford Federal Credit Union (SFCU)
has taken a different route to success. The foundation of its present
expansion is a solid understanding of what members want, coupled with
the ability to implement new products quickly and efficiently.
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Software Boosts Wall Street Use of IM and Group Chat |
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  IM and group chat have several distinct advantages over the
telephone and e-mail. They don’t interrupt the way a ringing phone
does, and messages don’t pile up as they do in e-mail inboxes.
“Instant messaging is a lot faster than e-mailing, and it allows you to
see who is online and who isn’t at any given time, which e-mail
doesn’t. The telephone, on the other hand, can disrupt your workflow,”
explained Graham Lawlor, program manager of instant messaging at
Deutsche Bank, and chairman of the Financial Services Instant Messaging
Association (FIMA), an industry group.
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Avanade: Taking Financial Advisors to the Next Level |
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 Formed through an alliance between Accenture and Microsoft seven years ago, the global technology integrator now has more than 2,500 clients in more than 30 countries. Its early success can be attributed to a methodology called Avanade Connected Architecture, or ACA.NET, a set of common tools and services that clients can draw from as they build on or integrate Microsoft technologies. Now Avanade has introduced a new tool that can serve financial advisors by tapping into a financial services institution’s underutilized computing power. Its suite is called Portfolio Studio and u | | | | | | |