Operations Newsflashes: NYBOT Joins Business Continuity Planning Network, and more

NYBOT Joins Business Continuity Planning Network

The New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) has joined the Financial Services Coordinating Council for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security (FSSCC), a business continuity-planning network, the futures exchange announced on Tuesday. FSSCC is a network of financial trade associations and private firms representing thousands of financial-services organizations. FSSCC works closely with the U.S. Department of the Treasury and financial regulators to coordinate the private sector's preparation for events that could disrupt business such as terrorism, natural disasters or cyber attacks.

The NYBOT lost its trading facility at 4 World Trade Center (WTC) in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Because it had established a back-up center in Queens, New York, after the 1993 WTC bombing, it operated out of its backup facility for nearly two years before moving back downtown to its new headquarters in the World Financial Center in September 2003.

"The NYBOT has been at the forefront of business continuity, and we're pleased to be working with the FSSCC to further coordinate industry-wide disaster-recovery plans," stated Steve Bass, NYBOT chief information officer, in the release.

Freddie Mac Taps Mellon Operations Executive

Freddie Mac named Joseph Rossi senior vice president, securities and treasury operations, effective Monday.

Rossi, 52, was most recently senior vice president, executive director and chief operations officer for global securities services at Mellon Financial Corporation, responsible for global custody and accounting services.

In his new role, Rossi will be responsible for managing operations related to Freddie Mac's mortgage securities issuance and settlement, debt issuance and settlement, derivative settlement and asset management. Rossi reports to Michael May, senor v ice president of operations.

Freddie Mac is one of the world's largest issuers of debt and manages the remittance of funds to investors on six continents.

HVB Americas Completes Deployment of SeeBeyond Integration Platform

HypoVereinsbank (HVB) Americas has completed the deployment of SeeBeyond's Integrated Composite Application Network (ICAN 5) as its application integration infrastructure.

The bank came to SeeBeyond to bring a straight-through processing strategy to its core transaction processes, such as foreign exchange and money markets trading that required manual intervention to complete. This led to numerous errors, failed trades and back-office overtime charges. The error rates from manual intervention were estimated as high as 30 percent by one internal study.

HVB was looking for a process integration and automation capability from deal capture and trade processing through back-office confirmation and settlement that could ultimately support process reengineering.

After evaluating integration offerings from other vendors, HVB Americas selected the SeeBeyond platform based on its time to market and lowest total cost of ownership, the bank said in the release. Most recently, the bank extended its use of SeeBeyond ICAN 5 suite to develop a real-time exception notification and management dashboard, whereby if the application detects an error, the individual who is qualified to address it, receives a notification, saving time and money.

The bank says it has reduced its transaction error rate to zero for a number of bank products and recouped the cost of investment in the integration platform within three to six months.

Calypso Names Ex-PeopleSoft Financial Guru to its Board

Calypso, a San Francisco-based provider of cross-asset, front-to-back trading solutions for the capital markets industry, added Ronald Codd to the company's board of directors. As its first independent director, Codd will chair the audit committee and serve as the board's financial expert. Codd previously served at PeopleSoft where he groomed the software company for its initial public offering in 1992. At PeopleSoft, Codd served as chief financial officer, senior vice president of finance and administration, and secretary of the company. During his seven-year tenure, the company grew its annual revenues from $15 million to $1.5 billion.

After leaving PeopleSoft, Codd assumed the role of president, chief executive officer and secretary of spinout software firm Momentum Business Applications, which was later purchased by PeopleSoft. (In December of 2004, PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle for $10.3 billion after an 18-month battle.)

Codd's 23 years of financial and administrative experience with technology companies also includes MIPS Computer Systems, Wyse Technology and Tandem Computers.