For Oracle to take out IBM requires more than talk

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 [...]

Sophis Survey – Derivatives Will Move to Exchanges and Clearing

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 [...]

Unromantics Unite for an UN-conference on Banking Innovation – 14 Feb.

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 [...]

What do banking CEOs know, and what is wrong?

“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 [...]

How Risk Management Failed at Citi

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 [...]

Microsoft Launches New and Improved HPC Platform

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 [...]

Banks Going to Hell, IT Budgets Follow? Not HPC!

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 [...]

Chicago Trading Firms Getting CVs from New York Traders

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 [...]

China Offers US Economic Advice

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 [...]

Banking Needs Big Bonuses — For Supervisors

Ah, here is a fresh idea from Charles Goodhart and Avinash Persaud  in the FT: give bank supervisors hefty bonuses that pay out over five years or so if the firms in their purview stay profitable. Next on their menu is a revision to Basel II capital adequacy requirements that raises them by a ratio [...]