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By Paul Allen American Savings Bank's implementation of an enterprise-wide banking solution based on the Signature Bank Platform from Fiserv marks a radical overhaul of the Honolulu-based firm's technology infrastructure. In total, American Savings will take 22 different products from the Fiserv range. "We are implementing the core processing suite, teller, sales and service, Internet banking, bill ... Full story

For property and casualty (P&C) insurers success is intimately tied to their ability to satisfy their customers’ needs by enhancing their product ranges on an ongoing basis. So when Safeco Corporation – which was acquired by Liberty Mutual last September – wanted to improve its product development capabilities it turned to Accenture, becoming the charter client for its newly created Insurance Configuration Components (ICC) software ... Full story

In this period of financial disarray and retrenchment, capital markets firms are focusing on three key areas: cutting costs, better risk management and concentrating on their client businesses to generate fees, says Ian Warford, Microsoft’s director of securities and capital markets in EMEA. And it is in that crucial client service area that ... Full story

When employee-owned institutional fixed income asset manager Stone Harbor Investment Partners was spun off from Legg Mason in March 2006 it had just four months to build its own IT infrastructure. "We had to get ourselves up on a shoestring and make the transition from Legg Mason to our own facilities, our own platform, and make that as transparent to the ... Full story

Lawyers don't come cheap. So it is easy to understand why Credit Suisse in London has been seeking to enhance the efficiency of its in-house legal team. To this end, Credit Suisse has implemented Business Integrity Software's DealBuilder system to help improve the process of creating ISDA Master Agreements, which establish the framework for the legal relationship between the bank and its trading counterparties ... Full story

The demands placed on actuarial software have never been higher, thanks to a combination of the evolving regulatory environment and advances in modeling techniques. What is more, the pressure being put on organizations' IT resources to cope with these changes will only become more intense. The solution though lies in leveraging an enterprise-level high-performance computing (HPC) architecture, says Marc Fakkel, head of operations with SunGard ... Full story

The launch on Sept. 26 of Alpha Trading, with its consortium of big bank backers, marks the latest milestone in the rapid development of electronic trading in Canada. Until recently the Toronto Stock Exchange was the sole venue for stock trading in Canada, but a host of alternative platforms are now coming into play. ... Full story

Sales traders operate in a fast-moving environment, and so don’t want to be burdened by islands of non-integrated technology, says Mark Adams, development manager with Execution Ltd., a London-based full-service agency stockbroker. Execution set about aggregating the information from three principle types of systems – external market data feeds, customer relationship management and trading – into a unified front-office desktop application that would help the ... Full story

Kumar Vadaparty and his development teams get high marks from the industry While Merrill Lynch’s win in this year’s Windows in Financial Services Developer Awards for its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Framework is a striking achievement, even more notable is that it is the second year in a row the firm has triumphed in the awards. So what is behind their success? ... Full story

A decade of acquisitions has transformed Towergate Partnership into Europe’s largest independently owned insurance intermediary. That path to growth, however, has brought with it a medley of legacy technology, with Towergate Underwriting – the organization’s underwriting division – amassing some 30 different administration systems. As its data was all over the place, it could not get a clear view of how well the organization was ... Full story