With turmoil continuing in financial markets, innovative development perhaps takes on new significance with its promise of differentiation and indeed cost savings.

Banks, brokerage firms, and insurers understand that the only way forward is figuring out, before their competitors do, how to achieve a clear, real-time view of their relationship with their customers across multiple products and channels. The institutions able to keep the attention of investment and Web-savvy millennial customers are those that offer personalized, high-quality service including on their Web site.

From the Editor:

The headlines keep coming: “U.S. Home Sales Plummet in September,” “Existing Home Sales Clogged by Mortgage Morass.” But vendors of mortgage technology have found a silver lining in this cloud, even while acknowledging that the market’s current conditions are unlike anything they’ve seen in decades of working in the industry.

From the Editor:

A 64-bit .NET-based pricing and risk management engine running on a 64-bit Windows Compute Cluster Server in UniCredit’s Markets & Investment Banking Division has achieved quick time-to-market for structured derivatives products. Through an integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, EDS SOLCORP’s WealthServ will combine the valuable customer data it houses for compliance, commissions, customer service and unified customer portfolio statements with wide-ranging CRM capabilities for an enhanced sales and customer service platform for insurance agents or investment representatives. A comprehensive enterprise-class spreadsheet compliance solution brings control, auditability and error analysis to business critical spreadsheets distributed across an organization in part by facilitating the management of spreadsheets in the SharePoint environment.

From the Editor:

One of the four talks in the opening general session of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) Technology Management Conference & Exhibit is titled, “Electronic Trading: Then and Now.”

That title could almost be a subtitle for our cover story article on the drive to build a combined OMS-EMS. Understanding why vendors are divided about whether order management systems and execution management systems should be combined involves a look at where the industry has been, as much as where it is going.

From the Editor:

Two years ago, at the ACORD/LOMA Conference held in Las Vegas, Gartner Group research director Kimberly Harris told an audience: “We hear the insurance industry is behind, but I don’t think you are. Yes, you have legacy systems to maintain that hamper you from moving forward, but with Web services and ACORD XML Standards, most industries can’t hold a candle to you.”

Today, to those comments we should add mobile technology. With its workforce that is more mobile by design than in other areas of the financial services industry, the manner in which the insurance industry has embraced mobile technology has been truly cutting edge. Whereas in other sectors mobile technology is prevalent for communicating, in insurance it is in use for working. It’s being employed to streamline the workflow process, and not only on a test basis.