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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.

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.

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.

Former U.S. Congressman Michael Oxley, vice chairman of Nasdaq, acknowledges that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act he co-authored was too onerous at first -- but says it has since spurred a global compliance trend.

In a recent roundtable, panelists offered advice on why it is important for hedge funds to increase transparency, perform "checks and balances" on valuations, add dedicated risk management functions and have a business continuity plan for trading operations. Ultimately, these practices will help reduce hedge fund risk and improve investor protections.

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:

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.

Charles Schwab Corp. named Walter W. Bettinger II as its new CEO, replacing the discount brokerage's founder.

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.

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.

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.

You Want One, But What Does Your Boss Think?

In spite of recent high-profile financial scandals such as the SocGen rogue trader case, most financial firms are still not fully investigating all suspicious activity alerts.

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%.

A huge data breach at an investment firm has thrown the spotlight on the dangers of allowing employees to use popular online file-sharing software such as LimeWire, after an incident saw an employee use the service to trade music or a movie, and unwittingly expose his organization's entire database to potential criminals.

Not only will Citi's new CIO Marty Lippert also take on the duties of corporate operations and technology chief operating officer, but the responsibilities will come with extremely high expectations -- namely helping Citi right its ship.

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.

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.)

When Liquidnet Holdings filed for its $500 million initial public offering (IPO) last week, the global marketplace for institutional trading said it would deploy a novel electronic-offering process. The company will require investors to submit electronically the prices and amounts of shares they are willing to purchase.

In a follow up to our news article from yesterday about Fidelity Investments hiring Daniel Petrozzo as CIO to oversee overall technology strategy and Ronald E. DePoalo, as CIO of Fidelity Institutional Products Group, my colleague John Soat of InformationWeek has some more analysis and information on the moves on his blog. He noted that DePoalo, former managing director and CTO for Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management, and Petrozzo, formerly co-global chief information officer and head of enterprise infrastructure at Morgan Stanley, may have left for greener pastures at Fidelity given all of the turmoil in the markets.

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