Archive for the ‘Special Features’ Category

NIIT Technologies has grown into a global IT and business process management services provider, with a footprint that spans 14 countries across the world. According to William Parkinson, vice president, insurance practice based in Atlanta, NIIT ranks among an elite group of global firms that have been assessed at Level 5 of CMMI. Parkinson ... Full story

Like many banks, Huntington occasionally received complaints from customers about long lines. Branch managers typically wanted to respond by adding staff. To determine how many people were needed, and when, the bank deployed staffing prediction software from Exametric. Now lines are shorter while the bank has saved more than half an FTE (full-time equivalent ... Full story

Deploying a rather unique combination of in-depth application analysis, documentation and automatic code migration services, SML’s FermaT technology allows financial firms to transform their legacy Assembler applications into flexible, dynamic systems capable of supporting the needs of the business. SML is the world-leading expert in Assembler software migration. Based on research first undertaken during ... Full story

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 ... Full story

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 ... Full story

For banks, compliance is about to move to the next level – the enterprise. ember ec3 Inc., a Toronto-based firm, has released .HeatShield 2.0 to provide an integrated and comprehensive risk and compliance application. Four major banks are working with ember to pilot .HeatShield. One bank with a multi-state presence agreed to talk ... Full story

Deposits provide the majority of the profit for the consumer financial services industry. While transaction and savings deposits currently account for only 10 percent of consumer financial assets (down from 16 percent in 1993), they provide 40 percent of revenues and translate to almost two-thirds of total industry profits associated with managing consumers’ ... Full story

Ian Sands, whose official title is director of industry strategy at Microsoft, first read about Umpqua Bank in an architecture magazine. With a background in Microsoft research and the Microsoft Consulting Group, he has created a team that takes leading edge technology and shows how it might be used in real world settings ... Full story

Dan Woodman has been named Microsoft's industry architect for insurance. He has an extensive background in both technology and financial services, has co-authored two books about SQL Server and worked in Microsoft's developer relations group under Sanjay Parthasarathy. For the last three years he has been part of a global team that focused ... Full story

I just got off the phone with a Sprint call center. Helpful man, he went through my account and transferred the billing address in just a minute or two. Before ending the call, he asked if he could interest me in Sprint PCS service. And then the inevitable, “Have I provided satisfactory service to you today?” or something like that. You’ve probably heard it a ... Full story