Most Read
- The Almost-Meteoric Rise of SaaS on Wall Street
- Financial Firms Try to Protect Themselves Against the Insider Job
- Online Brokers Woo Active Traders With Service, Support and Tools
- State Street Completes Derivatives Processing Hub
- 5 Steps for Stopping the Insider Threat
- Now Is the Time for Firms to Position Themselves for the End of the Economic Downturn
- SEC Unveils IDEA, Successor to 1980s-Era EDGAR Database
- Wall Street Plays Musical Chairs With C-Suite Executives
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TrendPoint Offers Suggestions for Greener Data Centers
August 27, 2008 @ 12:02 PM | By Penny Crosman
Data center energy management company TrendPoint Systems is offering a four-point plan for “green data centers”. Although the plan leads into a pitch for TrendPoint's product, it includes some helpful hints for those who find their data centers to be energy hogs.
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Adobe, GemStone to Speed Global Workflows, Document Sharing
August 22, 2008 @ 04:27 PM | By Penny Crosman
As Wall Street firms continue to open new offices in foreign countries and to outsource around the globe, one challenge for IT departments is to make sure that work, data and documents flow quickly and smoothly among widespread offices and data centers. Adobe and GemStone are announcing today a joint solution designed to meet this challenge: they’ve embedded GemStone’s GemFire data virtualization software, which harnesses the memory resources of many computers to speed up data retrieval and improve scalability and fault tolerance, into a version of Adobe’s LiveCycle workflow and document management software.
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Do’s and Don’ts of Setting Up an Asset Management Business in Japan
August 20, 2008 @ 02:18 PM | By Penny Crosman
Watching the Olympic diving competition last night and seeing how after every dive the Chinese athletes humbly bow, making a simple, graceful gesture foreign to most Americans, reminded me of how much we could learn and benefit from other countries' customs and practices. Such an attitude is critical to doing business in Asian countries, according to Roger White, managing director of IT consulting firm Citisoft. White recently completed a six-year stint in Tokyo, where he helped U.S. firms expand their asset management businesses in Japan (while working for PriceWaterhouseCoopers). When he first arrived, “I found everything was different – I had to check everything I knew at the door and learn to do things differently.” He observed that the U.S. firms that took a softer approach to implementing new practices, first trying to develop a deep understanding of existing processes and customs before introducing changes, fared far better than those that slammed their American ways on Japanese employees. Also, White found that demonstrating a new process in front of local employees and proving before their eyes that it worked before making them do it, helped them accept it.
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TGIF: The Price of Safety
August 07, 2008 @ 02:23 PM | By Penny Crosman
To help you mentally prepare for vacation, here's an in-flight safety video from Mad TV:
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ClearCube Rolls Out One-to-Many Virtual Desktop for Non-Power Users
August 05, 2008 @ 04:51 PM | By Penny Crosman
For “task” or “knowledge” users who do ordinary things with their desktop computers such as word processing, spreadsheets, email and web browsing, ClearCube is announcing this morning a virtual desktop solution that feeds multiple desktops – as many as eighty -- from one PC blade. In theory, this could save money and IT support time in the running of Wall Street's office PCs.
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Will the PC of the Future Be Shared?
August 04, 2008 @ 10:18 AM | By Penny Crosman
In a recent conversation with Jacob Hall, chief architect for the investment bank at Wachovia, he brought up an interesting idea he’s been thinking about: deploying desktop computers like workgroup printers. “Rather than virtualizing desktop computers and moving them to the data centers, where we already have expansion problems as most companies do, we deploy desktops where they are today, but we just deploy fewer of them,” he says. “We think a new type of workgroup computer needs to be created that can take advantage of this.” Each workgroup computer would serve twenty to forty people, he estimates.
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TGIF: Do Your Budget Meetings Look Like This?
August 01, 2008 @ 06:54 AM | By Penny Crosman
A tough-talking Rainn Wilson, aka Dwight Shrute from The Office, leads a meeting on budget cuts and gets ideas from a diverse group of employees in this SNL Digital Short.
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Wealth Managers Grade Themselves Poorly on Process
July 30, 2008 @ 05:22 PM | By Penny Crosman
Software company Northstar recently polled 5,500 wealth managers and found that on a scale of 0 to 80, the average wealth manager scored his firm a 32 in ability to offer best-in-class, holistic and personalized service.
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Bloomberg/Reuters Rival Preparing U.S. Launch of Mobile Apps
July 29, 2008 @ 02:15 PM | By Penny Crosman
On September 1, London-based Blue Systems will stage a U.S. launch of two new low-cost ($10 and $20 per month) global news applications for professional traders to use on their mobile devices. The blue mobile applications are designed to deliver worldwide news to the traders ahead of traditional internet and TV new vehicles such as cnbc and more cheaply than Bloomberg or Reuters desktop applications, over Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices. The products will target traders who need to know what’s happening in the markets when they’re away from their offices, after markets have shut down in the evening or in the morning before they open.
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Most Fund Administrators Worried About Backoffice Errors, Study Finds
July 25, 2008 @ 04:55 PM | By Penny Crosman
Eighty-four percent of senior managers at fund companies and fund administrators are concerned that manual processes are affecting their ability to control errors, according to a study released today by software company Confluence. The survey had 115 respondents, 40% of them C-level executives.
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The Dark Side of Google SMS
July 25, 2008 @ 07:04 AM | By Penny Crosman
A sketch comedy group called The Vacationeers has created a series of videos about Google extras. In this fourth episode of The Googling, Google SMS, a young man uses text messaging and gets more than movie times:
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State of the Reuters-Thomson Union
July 24, 2008 @ 05:37 PM | By Penny Crosman
Like a wartime marriage, the merger of Thomson and Reuters 90 days ago occurred in the harshest of market conditions – the subprime mess quickly led to losses and layoffs among the companies’ largest customers – and the merged entity appears to be feeling the strain. Thomson Reuter’s stock price has dropped in the last few weeks due to worries that its business will be affected by the Wall Street job cuts.
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NYC Brokerage Revels in the Joys of Paperlessness
July 22, 2008 @ 03:19 PM | By Penny Crosman
One of the ironies of office life is that often, the more tasks are automated, the more paper documents abound -- software that's supposed to obviate the need for paper documents tends to end up generating even more paper than before. But New York City-based retail and institutional brokerage Bishop Rosen is going truly paper-free this summer, by scanning and digitizing all printed documents, and users are relishing the freedom from paper.
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NYSE is Refining its Data Services
July 21, 2008 @ 06:22 PM | By Penny Crosman
Since 2001, the New York Stock Exchange has been using an analytics engine called 1010data Tenbase to quicklybuild new analytics tools for its customers. Today, the two firms announced that the NYSE has been using new features that 1010data is just now making generally available. The new features include multi-aggregation tools, time-series analysis, click-stream analysis and extract, transform and load. The 1010data platform lets the NYSE give its subscribers access to the exchange's mammoth archives and query multiple data sets through a simple web browser.
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Reader Offers Data Center Energy Use Tips
July 20, 2008 @ 10:28 PM | By Penny Crosman
After we ran a blog last week on the Accenture Data Center energy usage study, a knowledgable reader wrote in to share his own advice on reducing energy consumption, as follows.
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Data Center Energy Use Can Be Cut 55%, Accenture Project Results Show
July 15, 2008 @ 02:42 PM | By Penny Crosman
A new Accenture report has found that state-of-the-art energy efficient equipment and practices, including server consolidation, power management, air flow management and liquid cooling, can reduce data center energy use by 55%.
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Readers React -- Badly -- to Citi's New CIO and Strategy
July 08, 2008 @ 02:11 PM | By Penny Crosman
Shortly after we ran a piece yesterday about Citi's new CIO and IT transformation plan, two readers wrote in with critiques of Citi's strategy.
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Sybase Bets Big on Mobile Apps
July 08, 2008 @ 09:26 AM | By Penny Crosman
Betting that mobile messaging will become the new platform of choice for enterprise applications, Sybase is making a move today that will enable it to offer a more visual medium for messages sent over cell phones and smart phones.“Today, mobile messaging is used to fire off alerts, people use it to get information on stock prices, news and stock changes,” says Marty Beard, president of Sybase 365. Via Sybase’s announcement today that it will provide mobile data roaming services or mobile IP services over Cable & Wireless’s GRX network, customers will be able to send and receive stock graphs, news videos and other types of graphically intense, multimedia messages across multiple carriers. (Mobile IP is a communications protocol that lets mobile device users move from one network to another while maintaining a permanent IP address.)
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Lesser-Known Outsourcing Talent Pool: Orthodox Women in Israel
June 20, 2008 @ 10:45 AM | By Penny Crosman
Did you know there that there are hundreds of orthodox Jewish women in Israel with software programming degrees, strong work ethics and time on their hands? We learned about this unique workforce at the Banking on Israel IT conference held this week at the New York Stock Exchange, when we met the chief operating officer of Israeli outsourcing company Matrix.
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Credit Crunch is Driving Up Blade Server Use, Morgan Stanley Exec Says
June 19, 2008 @ 05:51 PM | By Penny Crosman
To a journalist covering the space, there’s no obvious connection between the credit crunch and the use of blade servers in Wall Street’s data centers. But Steve Russell, managing director and global head of enterprise computing at Morgan Stanley, made the link today at a symposium hosted by blade.org. “You can reasonably assume investment banks have an increased interest in modeling mortgage derivatives and other products,” he noted. “It’s caused a huge increase in demand for compute capacity. We first started using blades in 2002 and we were talking about how many chassis we wanted. Then last year we were talking about how many racks we wanted. Now it’s, how many thousands of systems do I want delivered in a given moment?”
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On Citi, Merrill, NYSE IT Executives’ Wish Lists: Utility Computing, Storage Fabrics, Justifiable Pricing
June 17, 2008 @ 04:50 PM | By Penny Crosman
At a panel discussion held today at the New York Stock Exchange and hosted by the Israel Export & International Cooperation Institute, executives from Citibank, Merrill Lynch and the NYSE shared their insights on the future of virtualization, storage and other IT components critical to Wall Street firms.
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Verari Offers Leasing Plan for Data Center Equipment
June 16, 2008 @ 02:44 PM | By Penny Crosman
Data center hardware has become a commodity and a chore to deal with, especially when servers and racks become obsolete two to four years after they’re purchased. Verari, a desktop and server blade and rack maker, has set up a new financial services group that will provide creative financing arrangements for data center equipment and refreshes.
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Wall Street Firms Ramping Up HPC for Risk, Portfolio Analysis
June 16, 2008 @ 10:36 AM | By Penny Crosman
A survey of high-level IT executives on Wall Street recently completed by Microsoft and KRC Research found that firms are facing increased demands to run real-time market risk analysis (25%), middle-office risk analytics (34%) and portfolio-related calculations such as rebalancing and hedging strategies (42%). These tasks all call for high-performance computing resources, such as hardware accelerators, fast databases and data grids. The respondents reported “a lot or some” demand for HPC to handle real-time market risk analysis (51%), middle-office risk analytics (50%) and portfolio-related calculations (54%).
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Credit Suisse Adopts Data Latency Monitor; CodeStreet Rolls Out New Latency Monitoring Tool
June 13, 2008 @ 04:54 PM | By Penny Crosman
As we noted in April and as Ivy Schmerken noted in her story in the SIFMA daily newspapers we put out, there’s a promising market forming around data latency monitoring tools for Wall Street firms, tools that measure and track precisely how long it’s taking market data to travel from exchange to algorithmic trading application and alert managers when latency problems occur. Such tools can help a firm make sure that its trading programs can react instantly to market changes. There were two more data latency monitoring announcements at the SIFMA show that we didn't have time to include in our earlier coverage this week.
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Wall Street Firms Lagging on the Green Front
June 11, 2008 @ 10:42 AM | By Penny Crosman
After conducting research off and on over the last six months on green computing, Sean O'Dowd, senior research analyst, global capital markets at Financial Insights, concludes that Wall Street is not all that green. "I didn’t feel anyone was doing anything amazing," he says. "You’d hope there’d be more innovative thinking around this. You’re seeing way better efforts from other regions of the world. While much of Europe and Australia are way ahead, the U.S. is on the same playing field as China in terms of being environmentally aware."
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The Case for AMD’s Opteron in the Data Center
June 09, 2008 @ 11:58 AM | By Penny Crosman
AMD today announced its latest round of quad-core Opteron chips, the processors formerly known as Barcelona. The new chips, called SE, are the highest performing Opterons; tests have shown them to run about eight percent faster than others in the Opteron line. Servers encasing these chips should start rolling out within the month: Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell and IBM have all committed to Opteron-based servers. (Sun’s new Sparc servers are already based on Opteron chips.)
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Tips for Data Center Efficiency
June 04, 2008 @ 01:20 PM | By Penny Crosman
“There are so many myths about data center efficiency,” says Chris Crosby, senior vice president of sales and technical services at Digital Realty Trust, a data center facility provider that counts JPMorgan and HSBC among its customers. “A lot of energy and cooling cost savings can be obtained through the use of common sense, without the need for special equipment.”
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Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Rates Group Getting A Tech Makeover
May 28, 2008 @ 01:45 PM | By Penny Crosman
The rates trading group at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities, part of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (the largest financial institution in the world in total assets), is putting new technology behind its approach to relative value pricing and dissemination of market data. The group, which was formed in March 2006 and now employs 50 people, is installing a real-time tick database and low-latency price distribution technology.
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CEP Gathering Momentum, New Use Cases
May 21, 2008 @ 11:15 AM | By Penny Crosman
Adam Honore, senior analyst at Aite Group, has just completed a worthwhile report on complex event processing (which I loosely define as technology that can perform analytics on streams of extremely fast-moving data) on Wall Street. After conducting interviews with captial markets technologists, vendors, standards organizations and data providers, Honore has come to several conclusions, among them:
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High-Performance Server Brings Low Latency to Java Apps
May 20, 2008 @ 11:36 AM | By Penny Crosman
Java’s popularity – according to IDC, more than $11 billion, or 20% of worldwide server spend, was devoted to Java servers in 2005 and analysts estimate that number is growing 15-20% annually – is sweeping the Street, at least according to anecdotal evidence. “There are four areas in which we’ve succeeded in the last 18 months: derivatives trading, risk analysis, hedge funds and foreign exchange,” reports Ram Appalaraju, vice president of marketing at Azul Systems, maker of a Java acceleration appliance used by many large Wall Street firms. “The reason they prefer Java is the cost of development in Java is a lot cheaper than any other programming environment.”
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SkyGrid Aggregates, Filters News for the Street
May 15, 2008 @ 05:14 PM | By Penny Crosman
Traders, institutional investors, research analysts – really, who doesn’t want to be able to see the latest news related to companies in which they’ve invested in or might want to invest? The challenge is being able to sift through the oceans of data available via news services, national and local publications, email newsletters, websites, blogs and social media to see the most relevant news the instant it happens, and be able to tell at a glance whether it's time to buy, sell or hold. A growing group of vendors, including veterans FirstRain and Monitor110 and newcomer SkyGrid would like to help you meet this challenge.
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Sybase Launches Shared Data Platform For Trade Data Analytics
May 12, 2008 @ 12:45 PM | By Penny Crosman
Sybase this morning announced a shared data service intended to enable all parties who deal with market data – traders, quantitative analysts, portfolio managers, risk managers, compliance officers and others – to work from the same page.
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U.S. Economy Will Escape Black Hole, JPMorgan's Economic Guru Predicts
May 05, 2008 @ 02:45 PM | By Penny Crosman
Bruce Kasman, chief economist at JPMorgan, offered a mostly upbeat forecast for the U.S. economy at the SIFMA Operations Conference this morning in Phoenix.
First Kasman noted the intense interest in the economy lately among people of all walks of life. "This is the first time in my professional life that my children have been interested in what I do for a living," he says. People in professional and social settings have been asking him exactly what's going to happen to housing prices, oil prices and such. Kasman says he's begun telling people who ask what he does for a living that he's a science fiction writer. "This [economy] is, in many respects, unchartered territory," he says.
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Want Your IT to Look Like Wachovia's? Call Tony Bishop
April 29, 2008 @ 12:48 PM | By Penny Crosman
We checked in yesterday with former Wachovia IT wunderkind Tony Bishop, who led a three year IT re-architecture effort at the firm (you can read about some of his work here). Last fall, Bishop, then a Wachovia senior vice president, took 15 of his staff and left to start his own consulting firm, called Adaptivity.
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A CEP Toolkit Just for Quant Researchers
April 25, 2008 @ 12:40 PM | By Penny Crosman
Intrigued by Vhayu’s announcement of a complex event processing tool geared toward quant researchers, yesterday I looked at this software. It gives quants a means to look for patterns, test ideas and strategies and run what-if scenarios against massive volumes of real-time and historical tick data. It combines some of the features of mathematical algorithmic modeling tools (such as Numerix and Algorithmics) with a fast historical and real-time tick database (a la Vhayu, Kx) with a front-end complex event processing graphical user interface (in the vein of Progress Apama, Streambase or Coral8).
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Virtual Storage and Memory Appliance Combo the Latest Approach to Low Latency
April 22, 2008 @ 11:57 AM | By Penny Crosman
For those on board the advancing trend on Wall Street to virtualize data centers and computing in general, the announcement from Violin and FalconStor this week, that they are offering a virtual storage server bundled with a fast memory appliance, should be interesting. The companies say that for $300 per gigabtye, their storage servers and memory units can stream data at speeds of two gigabytes per second and beyond, accelerating applications 10 to 50 times, while providing the benefits of virtualized storage.
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Wealth Management Trend: Socially Conscious Investing
April 18, 2008 @ 05:05 PM | By Penny Crosman
In the midst of this quarter's write-downs, layoffs and earnings disappointments, wealth management clearly remains a bright, profitable star on Wall Street -- in Merrill Lynch, for instance, wealth management was most strongly profitable unit this quarter and financial advisors have been promised they will be spared from the upcoming layoffs. In an interesting trend, more wealth management dollars are moving into socially aware investing. According to the Social Investment Forum, socially responsible investing assets in the U.S surged 18% from 2005 to 2007, outpacing broader managed assets. Although this research focused on institutional investors, retail investors are following the same pattern, at least according to Bill Crager, president of Envestnet. He should know; his firm's platform for financial advisors, which is used by 400 broker/dealers, beta tested a socially aware investment vehicle with a handful of small investment firms and attracted $300 million in six months.
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Baby Boomers Prefer Paper Statements and Prospectuses
April 17, 2008 @ 11:48 AM | By Penny Crosman
Aite Group recently asked a group of 505 U.S. baby boomers (251 pre-retirees and 254 recently retired) how they like to receive brokerage financial statements and prospectuses and to what extent they would like these to be paperless. Surprisingly, they're not as willing to forego paper as one might expect in these carbon-footprint-conscious times.
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Morgan Stanley Stands Up At Salesforce Revival
April 16, 2008 @ 03:24 PM | By Penny Crosman
Salesforce.com's Tour de Force event this morning was the closest I've ever come to attending a spiritual revival like the ones on TV. There was loud pop music, a charismatic and telegenic leader (CEO Marc Benioff) with a strong and clear if narrow-minded message (which is: utility or cloud computing is the future path for all business applications, preferably hosted on Salesforce.com's servers and software platform), dazzled audience members obediently yet enthusiastically nodding and clapping, and devoted followers summoned up on stage to share their conversion stories.
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Network Accelerator Makes Ethernet Networks Infiniband-Like
April 11, 2008 @ 05:47 PM | By Penny Crosman
If yours is like many Wall Street firms, you'd like to upgrade the one-gigabit Ethernet networks in your data centers to speed up applications, but you're not sure you want to make the leap to an exotic alternative like Infiniband or Fibre Channel. Startup company Teak Technologies offers a radically different idea: replace your end-of-row network switches with a layer of small, local switches that fit directly into racks or blades and, according to Teak, can accelerate an Ethernet network, save money and simplify network management.
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More Remedial Derivatives Technology Emerges
April 08, 2008 @ 10:06 AM | By Penny Crosman
You know markets are suffering when the latest new features vendors tout for their products have to do with liquidation pricing. This morning, SuperDerivatives announced it will provide the liquidation price (or ’exit price’) of all derivatives held within clients’ portfolios. Under the terms of FAS 157, firms are required to define the exit price of all instruments to calculate fair market value or "…the price that would be received to sell an asset or paid to transfer a liability."
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The Technology Challenges Ahead for the JPMorgan/Bear Stearns Merger
April 07, 2008 @ 11:17 AM | By Penny Crosman
Now that JPMorgan has announced that Peter Cherasia, head of global technology and operations at Bear Stearns, will stay on to manage technology, operations and real estate worldwide for JPMorgan's investment bank, he and the other surviving IT managers have a job ahead of them to merge the technology and operations of the two behemoth firms.
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Buy Side Still Laissez-Faire About Derivatives Processing
April 03, 2008 @ 10:23 AM | By Penny Crosman
La plus ca change, la plus c'est la meme chose -- when I mix my eighth-grade-level French with a report the Aite Group released this morning on buy-side OTC derivatives processing, this is what I come up with. As we reported last summer, sell-side firms (with a major push from the Fed) are working hard to automate derivatives processing; but buy-side firms are not.
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Small Flood of New Data Latency Monitors
April 02, 2008 @ 01:40 PM | By Penny Crosman
Over the last month and a half, a slew of vendors have introduced trade data latency monitoring tools, to help exchanges, brokerage houses and buy-side firms find, detect and eliminate the causes of trade data delays.
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Broadridge Rolls Out Workflow for Brokerage Operations
April 01, 2008 @ 09:49 AM | By Penny Crosman
Broadridge last night unveiled the first four of a set of 16 new retail brokerage operations applications designed to automatically handle most operations tasks and route only the discrepancies to operations staff, giving them the tools to quickly research and resolve them. The four initial Ascendis applications, all based on Microsoft ASP.net and BizTalk, automate credit risk administration, corporate actions, balancing and reconciliation and dividends distribution.
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Mobile Apps Are Gaining Respect, Flexibility
March 26, 2008 @ 11:36 AM | By Penny Crosman
Mobile applications and the people in charge of them are gaining more Street cred, according to Todd Christy, chief technology officer at Pyxis Mobile, a provider of wireless applications for the financial industry that counts Blackstone Group, Deutsche Asset Management and OppenheimerFunds among its customers. "Mobility is becoming a first class citizen in corporate America," he says. "We're seeing more chief wireless officers on Wall Street -- at least a half dozen firms have appointed someone to be a mobility leader." A high-profile case in point is Joseph Ferra, Fidelity's chief wireless officer, but several others have that responsibility if not the title itself, Christy says. This reflects an overall increase in demand for application access on the fly, he says.
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Mobile Apps Are Gaining Respect, Flexibility
March 26, 2008 @ 11:36 AM | By Penny Crosman
Mobile applications and the people in charge of them are gaining more Street cred, according to Todd Christy, chief technology officer at Pyxis Mobile, a provider of wireless applications for the financial industry that counts Blackstone Group, Deutsche Asset Management and OppenheimerFunds among its customers. "Mobility is becoming a first class citizen in corporate America," he says. "We're seeing more chief wireless officers on Wall Street -- at least a half dozen firms have appointed someone to be a mobility leader." A high-profile case in point is Joseph Ferra, Fidelity's chief wireless officer, but several others have that responsibility if not the title itself, Christy says. This reflects an overall increase in demand for application access on the fly, he says.
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Poor CDO Pricing Brought Bear Stearns Down
March 19, 2008 @ 02:09 PM | By Penny Crosman
What was the one fatal blow that caused Bear Stearns' suddden demise? Its inability to properly price collateralized debt obligations, according to a report issued by Financial Insights today.
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Could Technology Have Saved Bear Stearns?
March 18, 2008 @ 09:54 AM | By Penny Crosman
Although a full autopsy has yet to be performed on Bear Stearns, reason and common sense suggest that state-of-the art technology might have helped the firm circumvent some of its troubles. Here are a few examples.
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The Principal Saves Costs By Printing on Demand
March 17, 2008 @ 12:54 PM | By Penny Crosman
The Principal Financial Group, a provider of retirement and investment services, life and health insurance and banking with $311.1 billion in assets under management, has turned to print on demand software to streamline and reduce costs in generating and printing 401(k) statements and marketing collateral.
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Column-Based Databases Making A Wall Street Comeback
March 11, 2008 @ 06:41 PM | By Penny Crosman
The last time I met with Sybase, it was back when the big three database vendors were Informix, Oracle and Sybase — remember the 90s? This week, Gavin Quinn, FSI business development manager at Sybase, says the company is seeing a resurgence of interest in its high-speed, column-based databases among hedge funds and financial institutions.
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Doesn't Operations Deserve Some Respect?
March 06, 2008 @ 09:53 AM | By Penny Crosman
In news accounts about Societe Generale's recent trading fiasco, there were mentions of how the operations department was called "the mine" and all Jerome Kerviel wanted was to get out of there and become a trader. The International Herald Tribune reported that in 2006, a man working in Societe Generale's back office operations killed himself on a suburban train. This made me wonder -- is it time for a change in the way operations is viewed? Maybe the people responsible for settling billions of dollars worth of trades shouldn't be abused or treated like peons.
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Markit, Six Investment Banks To Launch Derivatives Pricing Platform
February 21, 2008 @ 10:30 AM | By Penny Crosman
In the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis and subsequent plummeting in value of mortgage-related derivatives such as CDOs, which in turn has generated a crop of unhappy investors, lawsuits and regulatory concern around improperly sold and priced derivatives, it's no wonder that companies that offer help in determining the value of derivatives contracts are coming out with new products. While many (Numerix, Maplesoft, Quantify) offer pre-built mathematical models for calculating the theoretical value of a derivative now and in the future, Markit, a provider of several derivatives indices, strives to provide actual prices at which certain types of derivatives are currently trading. (Reuters and NYSE Euronext also offer such derivatives valuations.)
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Wachovia Improves Its Forex App Response Time 33%
February 14, 2008 @ 02:52 PM | By Penny Crosman
Wachovia's investment bank had a problem: foreign exchange customers were complaining about platform performance issues. "Foreign exchange is not a good place to have performance issues -- not when you like to retain customers," notes Jim Hirschauer, architecture manager and technical expert for the corporate and investment banking technology division of Wachovia.
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What's Holding SOA Back on Wall Street? Missing SLAs
February 11, 2008 @ 04:44 PM | By Penny Crosman
The heavily siloed computing model that pervades Wall Street today is not transitioning to "SOA goodness" any time soon for one key reason: lack of service quality, said Hugh Grant, director of global IT research and development at Credit Suisse, at the Web Services/SOA on Wall Street show in New York City today. Funding, security, risk and compliance are additional hurdles to large-scale SOA adoption at investment firms, he said.
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