Financial Services | The TIBCO Blog

How is Wall Street Like the Keystone Cops?

April 28, 2013 by Sukki Sandhar Leave a Comment

Think of business in a new way. If one runner speeds up to get ahead of the pack, what tends to happen is everyone else speeds up to match his pace. With everyone running above their optimal level just to keep up, no one gets ahead and everyone loses efficiency… the market becomes less efficient. What if someone from the pack starts to run in a particular direction? The pack will follow and match the “leader.” Just like the Keystone Cops, the pack becomes a slapstick routine where everyone expends energy and resources to end up in another huddle, just at another location.

Getting an edge in the modern business environment has become a temporary advantage, as eventually everyone catches up. Technology that once put you ahead of the pack becomes mainstream; you have to look for another direction to run just to differentiate. In Capital Markets specifically, when it comes to trading, split microseconds provide a real revenue-driving edge. I’ve been told on numerous occasions that financial firms move hardware physically closer to the exchange to get any latency edge they can. The NYSE has even built a server room on their premise with every corporation having the exact same length of cable to the mainframe to discourage what had been a disastrous real estate land grab around their physical building. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services Tagged With: bank, banking, capital markets industry, financial services, Financial services industry, FTL, messaging, tibco ftl

Top Three Things Healthcare Can Learn from Other Industries

April 27, 2013 by Kevin Jordan Leave a Comment

Only a decade ago, India and China fully opened their societies to the West. Instead of telephone poles and landlines, Asian companies met 21st-century challenges head-on by skipping investing in outdated infrastructure for moving directly to smart phones and deploying mobile apps. A parallel can be drawn with the healthcare industry. Let’s leapfrog to 21st-century information technology solutions and stop trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s outdated technology.

The three broad areas healthcare needs to focus on include re-framing conversations, improving processes, and leveraging technology. These three areas are interconnected; it would be impossible to fully innovate in one without the other two. The processes have been proven in other industries, the technology is available to healthcare, and the industry has the power to innovate like never before. Learn how to transform the healthcare industry with 21st-century solutions at our HITP conference May 6-8. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Healthcare, Integration, Transportation and Logistics Tagged With: airlines, banking, financial services, Healthcare, integrated supply-chain, turning customers into fans

What Does Music Have In Common With Successful Banks?

April 22, 2013 by Shashank Srivastava Leave a Comment

Symphonies and orchestras are the two things that come to mind when I think of banking operations. Today’s banks have to outshine competitors and provide exceptional customer services; that’s the path of success. In doing so, banks need to harmonize technology and IT services that run and monitor business operations.

Like an orchestra, organizations have numerous back-end systems and applications playing their own tunes. The complexity lies in creating harmony that eventually soothes business initiatives around revenue growth through customer experience, improving operational efficiency, and mitigating risks. The right set of technologies enable enterprises to derive more value out of back-end systems or applications, address the complexities around managing volume, velocity, and variety of data (or BIG data) and help organizations do more – easier, faster, and more cost effectively. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Integration Tagged With: back-end, bank, banking, banking operations, China Trust Commercial Bank, integration, it, orchestra

Banks are Still Failing Because They Don’t “Get” Risk

February 5, 2013 by Shashank Srivastava 3 Comments

Banks are still failing and will continue to fail into the future if they don’t take risk seriously and take steps to safeguard against failure.

In 2012, the Fed tested the banks’ ability to withstand a crisis, similar to the one from five years ago, that caused unemployment to rise to 13%, a 50% fall in share prices, and a 21% drop in housing prices. Some of the top banks once again failed to show they have enough capital to survive another serious downturn. A Bloomberg article yesterday discussed how Fed regulators and the Dodd-Frank Act have been historically at odds.

Even after the past failure, banks were either too exposed outside the U.S. or were planning to hand too much money back to investors. This means, they lack a “single view” of global enterprise-wide risk exposure, with various internal silos only concerned with their own priorities.

A single snapshot of risk

In a mandate from a global governing committee, top banks have been given three years to build up a single view of all their risk to help make the wider financial system more resilient. These global banks have many branches and subsidiaries, complicating the creation of a single snapshot of risk. They will have to get on top of this initiative as a temporary stopgap, but what about future updates, and/or further changes in regulation?

Banks need to assess risk whether a regulation or a law mandates it or not. The end-game is what efficient compliance enables – long-term strategic and operational improvements, not compliance for its own sake. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Integration Tagged With: banking, banking regulation, banks, banks fail, compliance, financial, financial services, Financial services industry, integration, regulation

Trade Processing in One Second is Like Not Answering Email for Two Weeks

January 30, 2013 by Kenan Frager 3 Comments

The high-speed financial services industry (FSI) can’t deal in seconds or even milliseconds. That would be far too slow. Processing a trade in one second would be like taking two weeks off, not telling anybody, and not touching your email. When dealing with stock prices that fluctuate in real time, any delay can mean the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. This means the trades that really matter in the financial services world need to move in one millionth of a second (10^-6) and technology “pipes” need to carry an incredible amount of data.

Speed is all that matters

For Citihub, an FSI IT provider, performance is absolutely paramount for their clients. If it’s faster, Citihub wants it because their customers need it. If technology isn’t even a thousandth of a second faster than the latest version, they don’t want to hear about it. They want to know how quickly a message can get from point to point, whether it’s trades, market data, or any piece of useful financial information. Bottom line: it needs to travel unnaturally fast.

Citihub provides consulting services and technology infrastructure to serve their clients in technically complex and business critical environments. Citihub searched for a faster messaging solution for their clients’ high-volume, low-latency trading needs and that search ended with TIBCO. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Integration Tagged With: banking, Big Data, Citihub, Financial services industry, financial services industry trends, FTL, integration, messaging, regulation, world record

Structure No Longer Has a Vote on What’s Data or Not

January 29, 2013 by Sukki Sandhar Leave a Comment

Not so long ago, businesses didn’t care about information outside the normal structure of trusted outlets like print media, trade journals, academic research and other trusted system-generated information. In fact, I would go so far as saying that if it wasn’t structured, it wasn’t data. All of this changed soon after customers started to freely express their comments and opinions on websites and bulletin boards. Views became another data point to track and analyze to harness customer preference as an aggregate and per each individual. In some ways, unstructured customer data via connectivity and social media has multiplied the already growing challenge of big data.

Unstructured data now matters

Now businesses thrive or fail on what these un-controlled, unstructured data sources say. From retailers to job sites, what unstructured data says about a business and brand matters. Businesses don’t control unstructured data sources, and this scares them. But, just like structured data sources, business can ingest, understand, react, and even anticipate what’s going to happen if they are clever. The speed and pace at which unstructured data sources spread has increased due to the nature of the Internet and global connectivity. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Integration Tagged With: banking, banks, customer service, financial crisis, financial sector, financial services, Financial services industry, integration, structured data, unstructured data

Financial Sector Faces Financial Crisis

January 28, 2013 by Kevin Jordan 1 Comment

Banks have a need to embrace regulation and compliance as a way to regain the public’s credibility and to earn back the trust of the large investors.

Ups and downs

The financial sector has had its ups and downs. Once it was declared, “Banks are too big to fail” in 2008, the “bank problem” was thought by some to be decided. However, in 2010 the Occupy protests gained sympathy when railed against saving such large financial organizations for what many saw as self-inflicted wounds. The public was somewhat mollified when most of the banks paid back the money from the bailouts. Nevertheless, still today people offer up their complaints, arguments and protests.. No matter what side of the aisle it comes from, a flurry of opinions fill the Internet, newspapers, and bulletin boards every day.

Now we have a different form of protest that is not being fought with picket signs, but perhaps the strongest tool of all — silence. Big investors have recently made feelings known (and voices heard) with their wallets and are putting their money into new ventures. Interestingly, shareholders selling their stakes in companies have tripled since 2008, creating new millionaires but that cash has not found its way into the financial services industry. The biggest fish are swimming somewhere else. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Integration Tagged With: banking, banks, financial crisis, financial sector, Financial services industry, FSI, integration, too big to fail, tycoon

TUCON 2012 Kicks Off: Everything Really IS Different

September 25, 2012 by Chris Taylor 1 Comment

TIBCO’s TUCON 2012 kicked off this morning with the theme, “Everything is Different.” From the start, the areas of Digital Customer Experience Management, Big Data, Social and Consumerization took center stage, beginning with the opening address by TIBCO founder and CEO Vivek Ranadivé.

While You Were Sleeping

Vivek talked about how to make the worst of times into the best of times, a reprise of his video discussion found on Forbes. He drew parallels with Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” opening words: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” This was a great description of where business finds itself today. The key to thriving in these times is to deliver extreme value and to reinvent yourself and your enterprise for the 21st century, he told the packed event.

Chief Marketing Officer Raj Verma

Chief Marketing Officer Raj Verma continued with the TIBCO vision that establishes customer experience management as a critical business imperative for every company on the planet. He talked about the switch from analog to digital marketing and what that means to the modern enterprise.

Raj took the audience through the significant expansion of the digital customer experience, from the fact that iPhone sales outpaced the growth of the human population, that 4.7 billion minutes were spent on Facebook and that 22 million hours of video were streamed on Netflix, all while we slept last night.

Before leaving the stage, Raj laid out the TIBCO two-second advantage™, the ultimate goal of his event-enabled customer, delivered through automation, events, analytics, cloud and social. He described the TIBCO platform as tightly integrated and loosely coupled… a big advantage for organizations trying to find the right partner to excel during these times. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Cloud, Financial Services, Government, Healthcare, Loyalty, Mobility, Retail, Social, Tech Trends, Transform, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: Big Data, Consumerization, Digital Customer Experience Management, Matt Quinn, Raj Verma, social, TUCON, Vivek Ranadivé

Lowering the Total Cost of Ownership for IT Projects

May 16, 2012 by Kenan Frager Leave a Comment

At global, dynamic organizations, like commercial banks, IT undertakes large and small projects every week. This becomes increasingly more complex and increasingly more expensive for companies when implementing software solutions across regions and through language barriers. TIBCO lowers the costs for every new project by integrating diverse enterprise systems. Having a uniform, centralized dataflow allows IT to have greater access to the easy-to-utilize information they need to implement new software solutions.

Taiwan’s largest global bank, award-winning Chinatrust Commercial Bank, used TIBCO in their expansion to the huge financial markets of Singapore, New York, Hong Kong, Japan, and India. You can see how IT would have problems standardizing a single service like loans with such a diverse customer base. New projects at Chinatrust have cost savings as high as 30 to 40 percent for any given project, with a service re-use rate at 30 to 35 percent.

21st-Century Global Banking Finds New Success Factors

May 3, 2012 by Amitava Kundu Leave a Comment

The globalization of banks is not a new business model for revenue maximization; however over years of geographic expansion, banks have understood that maintaining quality of service standards for a consistent customer experience is the secret to success. Customer satisfaction, cost reduction, and profitability in global operations have surpassed growth as the primary objective, especially in the aftermath of recession. Paramount to keeping customers coming back to your bank, especially today’s tech-savvy consumers who cannot live without the internet, smart phones, and tablets – is the ease of doing business that matches the intuitive ease of the consumer web.

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