No hiding from Fair Isaac, apparently. The provider of analytics and decision management technology (i.e., the technology that makes your loan more expensive if you’ve missed a payment here and there) has announced that version 6.1 of its Blaze Advisor...

At SIA Risk in New York the other day, presented put up dense black and white PowerPoints with the usual comment about eye charts. Really. How long has PowerPoint been around? Can’t presenters understand they don’t have to pay by the screen – if the...

In a survey of British security chiefs, terrorism ranked as their least important concern, behind crime, IT security, fraud, and natural disasters, say Rachel Briggs and Charlie Edward, authors of The Business of Resilience in an FT op-ed piece. They...

What happens when the latest processors are outpace data delivery? Delays. High latency and poor scalability often pose challenges that significantly impact a financial services firm's profitability and risk exposure. The 'GemFire™ on Intel® for Financial...

The SEC is prodding companies to start reporting their financial data in a format called XBRL, nicknamed interactive data. Annual and quarterly reports filed this way can be "read" by computers, allowing investors to pull revenue, net income or any other...

Last week at the SIA tech conference, Microsoft and BT announced a communications alliance (see below). Now HP and LG-Nortel have come out with their plans to work with Microsoft. Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, explains what...

ClearCube Technology plans to launch two PC blade servers, in a bid to compete with Hewlett-Packard Co. for customers in finance, insurance, hospitals and the military. Both blades will use Intel Corp. chips and will have enough power to run Microsoft...

TEMENOS Group, a provider of integrated banking systems, has announced that TEMENOS T24, its modular core banking system, will add support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005. TEMENOS T24 now works with key Microsoft products and technologies running from the...

Warburg Pincus LLC, and Greenhill & Co. have purchased and deployed Riverbed's Steelhead(R) wide-area data services (WDS) appliances to enable global collaboration and IT consolidation in their fast-paced, email- and document-intensive work environments...

CDC is continuing to pursue Onyx because it has complementary CRM capabilities that neither Pivotal nor c360 have been able to provide, particularly in such industry verticals as insurance and government. The first offer made little financial sense...

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced today that Automatic Data Processing, Inc., Ford Motor Company, Ford Motor Credit Company, and Radyne Corporation have agreed to participate in the pilot program to use interactive data in their financial...

Envision Financial Systems, which develops Microsoft-based stock transfer software, has announced plans to relocate its world corporate headquarters to Irvine , California . The new headquarters will provide room for further growth in headcount as well...

REAAL will consolidate its existing support contracts and suppliers to one contract with Unisys which would reduce their number of service suppliers from 20 to 1. REAAL said that it hopes to achieve significant reductions in cost through consolidation...

Portrait Software has announced that sales of CRM software are up 42 percent for the first half of 2006 over year ago results, led by OEM sales through Fiserv, which more then tripled from last year. Portrait is a Microsoft Gold Partner. http://www.portraitsoftware...

· BT has announced that it is working with Microsoft to develop a unified communications capability that will allow participants in the financial trade cycle to share information regarding their presence, and preferred means of communication in real time...

Great for Wal-Mart, but for the securities industry? Kevin Ashton of ThingMagic argued at the SIA that as documents become fewer they also become more critical, and RFID can be a way to locate them quickly, identify redundancies and show up gaps in documentation...

What happens when a small, fast, high-powered firm – ARCA – meets a 200-year old nonprofit exchange – the NYSE? Steve Rubinow, CTO of the NYSE Group, didn’t go into details of the challenges, but it is clear he isn’t going to be the one to surrender....

The securities is making more in gross revenues but not in profits, largely because of compliance costs, said Mark Lackritz, president of the Securities Industry Association. He said the industry spends $25 billion on compliance. One result – firms are...

Misys Banking Systems showcases Misys Opics Plus at SIA 2006 Misys Banking Systems, a global leader in banking software and solutions, is demonstrating the new .NET powered Misys Opics Plus at Microsoft’s booth #2211 at SIA 2006. Misys Opics Plus is...

The two hottest bits of Microsoft news at SIA are the new versions of Excel, including a server version with security and audit controls, and Windows Computer Cluster Server, a high-power, low-cost, low-complexity entrée into high performance computing...

OpenSource Magazine sees Windows Compute Cluster, which Microsoft will demo at SIA in New York this week, as a potential threat to Linux in high performance computing -- a market that IDC says grew 24 percent last year. Microsoft thinks it stands a...

The most intelligent bit of analysis on Bill Gates and Microsoft's role hasn't appeared in any of the recent news stories, which are pretty wishy washy historical rehashes. It was in a piece by Richard Waters of the Financial Times early in the week,...

Microsoft will unveil a trading platform next week based on the new version of Windows for supercomputers released last week and a new Excel spreadsheet due later this year. The platform will be shown during a Securities Industry Association technology...

Intel is working with Microsoft and Tokyo-based BitWallet to drive use of Sony's FeliCa contactless IC card technology for Internet transactions. Intel is teaming with both Microsoft and Bitwallet - which provides the EDY contactless payment system -...

If it’s the third week of June it must be time for SIA. At least the complaints are a little different from those about ACORD and BAI where vendors say all they see is vendor badges. At SIA people complain about the New York souvenir seekers who sign...