Author Archive

By Sherree DeCovny Founded in 2000, Formuesforvaltning is the largest, privately owned independent wealth management firm in Norway. Its clients include 4,500 private and institutional investors, and it has more than $3.6 billion in assets under management. Always striving for innovation and the best quality, the firm pushed IT to its boundaries to establish a truly ... Full story

By Sherree DeCovny Harford Mutual, a Maryland-based property & casualty insurer, does not have a data warehouse, so its existing online transaction processing (OLTP) databases are used as the source for about 450 reports. At peak reporting times when all the online applications hit the same databases, the day-to-day transaction-based systems slow down significantly. To rectify ... Full story

Financial market firms face a unique set of workflow challenges. Massive amounts of data that need to be pulled from various business units within the enterprise make it a challenge for analysts to do their job quickly. Time is money, and any delay increases the probability of losing the deal to the competitor down the ... Full story

Efficiency and productivity are back at the top of the list of every CIO and CTO. Almost a decade ago the financial community found itself trying to weather the economic downturn of the dotcom collapse. Reducing headcount, slashing budgets, projects canceled or put on hold are again the norm. Unfortunately, the computational requirements faced by firms today are not decreasing. Increasingly sophisticated financial products, complex hedging ... Full story

  In response to the current financial crisis, financial institutions are trying to restore trust and confidence by focusing on their core business. S.R. Ramaswami, Executive Vice President of Polaris Software Lab, explains how its customers are leveraging HPC to satisfy customers and comply with regulations through improved operational efficiency, risk management and product pricing. WFS: How have ... Full story

New regulations and rapidly changing market conditions are increasing the demand for more sophisticated analysis in shorter timeframes. Van Beach, MG-ALFA Director of Business Development at Milliman explains how HPC helps actuaries and risk managers work more efficiently and effectively to handle the increased workloads. WFS: What challenges do your clients face in today’s environment? VB: Financial modeling ... Full story

  Many insurers want to partner with a large IT company that can provide an end-to-end High-Performance Computing (HPC) solution. Teri DeWalt, HPC Financial Services Marketing Manager, and Alan McCarter, HPC Financial Services Sales Executive at IBM talk about the company’s complete offering, which includes consulting and implementation services, hardware, middleware, and cloud computing. WFS: How does IBM ... 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

Regulation such as Solvency II, principle-based approaches and volatility in the markets are driving the need for more complex actuarial/financial models and greater computing power. According to Brian Heale, Product Director at Towers Perrin, insurers would benefit by migrating from their desktop systems to an enterprise IT environment with the computing power, security, audit capability ... Full story

  Barclays Bank has come up with an innovative way of reducing the wait times for customers and at the same time potentially increasing the customer’s business with the bank.  As part of an ongoing program to refurbish its 1,733-branch network in the UK, Nicolas Parmaksizian, head of business development, and Deanna Oppenheimer, CEO of UK Retail Banking, ... Full story