Headstrong participated at SIFMA’s 29th Annual Technology Management Conference & Exhibit in New York from 23 to 25 June, 2009. This is the securities industry’s premier annual exhibition with more than 8000 visitors and showcased products and services from over 300 specialized vendors this year.
The Headstrong booth was elegant, tastefully done up and centrally located. The booth presented informational material and self-running presentations on a variety of our specialized offerings, with special emphasis on the Eagle and Calypso centers of excellence, the iceFish product suite, our proprietary application support tools - HeadBoard and HeadMon and HBS mortgage processing services.
Upcoming trends in the financial services market
The conference presented a bird’s eye-view into upcoming trends in the financial services and securities industry. This year the conference talks touched upon cost cutting, regulation, OTC derivatives, data management, cloud computing and SAAS/managed services.
One of the most interesting talks was by Frank Abagnale on his life as a teenage imposter with multi-million dollar frauds to his credit and how he went on to work with FBI. Steven Spielberg made the movie “Catch me if you can” based on his life. http://www.abagnale.com.
Tim Ryan, CEO of SIFMA spoke about the shifting of focus from performance to regulation and the additional need for more technology solutions and spend. He described SIFMA’s efforts to help industry participants deal with additional compliance reporting needed after SEC ban on Short selling and OTC derivatives regulation. SIFMA developed framework to reduce systemic risk & reporting of exposure to OTC trades and collateral maintained.
Mike Blum, SVP Financial Services at HP talked about the consumption based business & IT models which will change fixed cost to variable cost and will be enabled by the current over capacity and high availability of bandwidth. Bob Moffat, SVP at IBM touched upon Workload optimizing computing as 50% of infrastructure capacity not used and virtualization (storage and servers) and cloud computing will address this.
Rick Bookstaber author of “A demon of our own design” spoke on causes of financial crisis, attributing it to two main factors: Leverage – even prudent banks are forced to take leverage due to pressure to meet quarterly targets and peer pressure. Excessive leverage creates illogical correlations and increases systemic risk. Complexity – derivatives were initially designed for risk transfer and price discovery but later misused to “game the system” by creating complex products to avoid taxes and speculate etc. See http://rick.bookstaber.com
Carl Trieloff, Director at Red Hat spoke on AMQP (Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol) which has the potential to become messaging standard for business messaging.
Stanley Young, CEO of NYSE Technologies described NYSE’s future plans. NYSE invested $1 Billion in technology in last 3 years and created liquidity centers – 100,000 sq ft data center in NJ, 200,000 sq ft near London.
Hal Stern, VP of System Engineering at Sun Microsystems spoke about Cloud architectures stating that benefits of cloud accrue due to virtualization, multi-tenancy, real-time user-controlled provisioning and pay per use. He described different service types including SaaS which is a hosted application like salesforce.com, platform as a service which is a developer platform with built-in services like google app engine and iInfrastructure as a service where storage and computing services are offered like amazon web services.
Representatives from Sungard, JPMC and CBOE reviewed Mission Critical Projects that will need attention in coming months including short selling up-tick rule, option symbology testing, MBS CCP pool netting initiative, FINRA’s extended TRACE reporting to include securities guaranteed by agencies, DTCC OFAC certification, and cost basis reporting.
Don Hopkins, CIO of Sungard said that IT cost cutting can be achieved by tracking TCO for labor, infrastructure, HS/SW maintenance, telecom etc. and streamlining application portfolio by creating inventory, reducing size & complexity of applications, reviewing service levels, and reducing S/W licensing cost,
Nagui Halim, Director at IBM and Rizwan Khalfan, CIO of TD Waterhouse described a
prototype using InfoSphere Stream processing to process about 25 MM mps (messages per second). OPRA feed is peaking at 1.2 MM mps, bandwidth ceiling is 1.5 MM mps going up to 2.5 MM mps by 2010. Challenges in stream processing are complex analytics, data variety, huge volumes, and scalability.
