A recent publication from SunGard and senior risk practitioners from International Association of Financial Engineers (IAFE) about complexity and financial risk is interesting, although they fail to grapple with some of the key aspects. They defend complexity, as you might expect, with no effort to demonstrate that it provides value beyond the financial services industry. [...]

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Larry Ellison has said that with the acquisition of Sun he is ready to take on IBM in the enterprise. Others don’t think so. I’ve been steadily impressed with what IBM is doing in financial services. Everyone talks solutions, and has done for years, but IBM seems to offer the combination of hardware, software and [...]

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Sophis, a provider of portfolio and risk management solutions, says a survey of risk professionals shows that they expect at least 50% of their CDS trades will move from OCT to exchange-cleared platforms and 73% said that that next generation clearing houses for CDSs are absolutely necessary to improve credit trading “The finance industry is [...]

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OK, the tech visionaries who want to talk about innovation in banking probably don’t have a social life anyway, so here’s an event for them – BarCampBank, which promotes itself as the Unconference group is holding a full day confernce on Saturday 14 February at Sun’s offices in London. “If you are an innovator, a [...]

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“What keeps you awake at night?” In interviews with more than 1,000 C-level executives at firms around the globe – including 54 financial institutions – IBM researchers trotted out that standard question. Quite a number of deep issues, it turns out. “A very high number of financial services executives, 80%, is figuring out what their [...]

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In Sunday’s New York Times, Eric Dash and Julie Creswell take apart the failed risk management practices at Citigroup in a detailed article that draws on extensive comments from bank insiders. Much of the cause will be no surprise – traders overpowered the risk managers, a senior risk manager was good friends with the guy [...]

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In the works for two and a half years, according to one person on the team, Microsoft has brought out a new version of HPC with the familiar Windows front end, so Super Power (Kryptonite not included in the base price) is not only available but usable. The company wheeled out some impressive executives for [...]

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Hey, wait a minute. When you’re in a hole, stop digging. Get a supercomputer. That’s how things looked last Monday at High Performance Computing on Wall Street.  This show, a combined effort of Russ Flagg and Pete Harris, now at A-Team Group, has been a popular one despite a schedule that coincides with heads of [...]

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Chicago is definitely the Second City for most people working on Wall Street, as suggested by that famous New Yorker cover showing a native’s view of the world west of the Hudson as an alien wasteland. But the Chicago Tribune says that the city’s futures markets have flourished, in part because they don’t do OTC [...]

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Ah, sweet revenge. Chinese leaders are offering the US advice on how to run its economy, and a bit of criticism on its performance so far, reports Edward Wong in The New York Times. The Chinese have called America’s concept of economic regulation “warped,” and called on the country to halt the dollar’s decline. America [...]

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