Wall Street & Technology: Blog

The Technology Challenges Ahead for the JPMorgan/Bear Stearns Merger

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:17:57 -0500

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.

Buy Side Still Laissez-Faire About Derivatives Processing

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:23:35 -0500

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.

Broadridge Rolls Out Workflow for Brokerage Operations

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:49:40 -0500

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.

Banks Seize Web 2.0 Opportunity

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:04:55 -0500

Joining the ranks of a growing number of banks increasingly focusing on Web 2.0, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is targeting Facebook users by launching a financial advice blog that can be accessed through its fan page on the popular social networking site.

Is Wall Street Ready for the iPhone?

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:54:18 -0500

Apple's announcement that it is now targeting its iPhone to business customers too with improved security and integration of e-mail, calendars and contact lists, has generally received positive reviews in the press. But is Wall Street ready to trade in their BlackBerrys and Treos for a more colorful iPhone?

Doesn't Operations Deserve Some Respect?

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:53:18 -0500

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.

Online Investment Site Cake Moves into Facebook

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:18:42 -0500

Cake Financial, the social network investment service that lets investors track and share the performance of their actual brokerage accounts, has launched a Facebook application.

Wachovia Improves Its Forex App Response Time 33%

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:52:33 -0500

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.

What is the banking future of Second Life?

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:10:06 -0500

Dutch banking group ING is closing the online community it launched in the virtual Second Life world last year.

Capital Markets Firms to Spend $41.8 Billion on IT in 2008, Aite Says

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:03:50 -0500

Aite Group put out a new, optimistic IT spending report for the capital markets yesterday that, like the Wall Street & Technology IT spending survey that we released in November, predicts an increase in IT spending of just under 10% for 2008, as well as for the ensuing years through 2011. (By contrast, a more conservative Celent report anticipated only a 4% rise in spending this year, to $36.2 billion.)

Wall Street Firms Weather Massive Internet Outage

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:49:36 -0500

Although damaged cables under the Mediterranean Sea shut down or severely slowed down internet service today across India, Egypt and the Middle East, Wall Street firms with IT staff and outsourcing projects in India seem to have been been well served by their network backups.

How Intel Plans to Save $1 Billion on Its Data Centers

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:47:17 -0500

Who doesn't want to make their data centers more cost-effective? When we asked sell-side firms recently where in IT they would most increase spending in 2008, 82.4 percent said "data center infrastructure" -- this ranked far above any other item on our list. That's why we thought we share with you some highlights of a report Intel released this week that details how it avoided spending $30 million on its data centers in 2007 and how it plans to achieve nominal cost savings of $1 billion over the course of eight years.

New Xignite Platform Helps Developers Combine Web Services into Applications

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 10:43:58 -0500

For all their benefits (including reusability and flexibility), one downside of services-oriented architecture is the painstaking work of knitting together reams of web services every time you want to build a new application. Xignite yesterday introduced for its customers a simple platform for mashing or �splicing� web services together, called Splice Studio.

Wall Street Firms to Spend $38.2 Billion on IT in 2009, Says Celent

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:50:13 -0500

Are Wall Street firms going to significantly increase IT spending in the coming year, as a Wall Street & Technology survey conducted last fall indicated, or will the subprime-related losses force those budgets to be slashed? A new report from Celent stakes a conservative middle ground -- it predicts IT spending for North American securities and investment firms in 2008 and 2009 will grow 4% over 2006 and 2007 levels.

Remote Desktops Coming to Wall Street in 2008

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:53:38 -0500

Here's a prediction for the coming year: remote desktopping -- in other words, moving desktop CPUs off (or out from under) desks and into racks, data centers and closets -- will hit the Street in force some time in 2008, or maybe 2009. Wachovia has already said they're kitting out the new trading floor in their under-construction Charlotte headquarters with remote desktops (or "back-racked PCs" as they call them), which will open in 2009, and the inventors of the latest generation of remote desktop technology, Teradici, say that 20 Wall Street firms have expressed interest in it.