The £300 million project to cut thd 3 day wait for clearing payments at high-street banks has been delayed by 6 months. Vocalink, who are developing the service, came across an issue in testing and are now to delay the service until May 2008
September 22, 2007
Reuters sign with Fujitsu
Reuters have signed a 10 year contract with IT services group Fujitsu. The contract is worth roughly £500 million. Reuters expect to save £150 of IT spending over the course of the deal.
Tags: Reuters, Fujitsu, outsourcing
Barclays also need emergency loan
A “technical breakdown” meant that Barclays Bank had to apply for an emergency £1.6 billion loan from the Bank of England. Barclays blamed the ther eason on a malfunction with the Bank’s inter-settlement system, Crest. This left the Bank temporarily unable to cover its positions in the market.
Concerns over liquidity in the global financial markets certainly seem justified with the admission of facts coming out of high street banks over the last month…
September 19, 2007
Salesforce.com Launches New Apps: Content, Ideas
SAN FRANCISCO—Salesforce.com is rolling out two new applications that are designed to extend its application set from four to six, but will still keep the company rooted to its origins: CRM.The new Salesforce Content and Ideas applications, announced at the company’s Dreamforce user conference here Sept. 17, will grow the use of Salesforce.com’s applications from what might typically be the sales, support and marketing teams—and IT, as Salesforce creeps ever deeper into the platform market—to just about any department within an enterprise.
Salesforce Content, for example, provides a raft of Web 2.0 technologies—tagging, subscriptions, recommendations—that help users to manage unstructured data. Salesforce Ideas is a service that enables companies to build communities where participants can post and vote on ideas.Based on its own experience with IdeaExchange, a Web page on the Salesforce.com site that lets just about anyone post ideas for upgrades and rate other ideas—and where much of Salesforce.com’s development initiatives stem from—Ideas enables customers to build online communities where participants can submit, discuss and promote concepts around such issues as software development. Salesforce officials said in a statement that its own internal use of IdeaExchange has “changed the face of development,” with customers and partners shaping future product releases in live debates. To date, more than 5,000 ideas have been posted and “numerous” ideas have been incorporated into Salesforce applications.
Salesforce.com Launches New Apps: Content, Ideas
Tags: Salesforce.com, web 2.0, IdeaExchange
September 15, 2007
eXpansys expands
Online retailer eXpansys has acqyired YooNoo Ltd for a total of £1.2 million. YooNoo owned http://www.globalpositioningsystems.co.uk amongst other sites making YooNoo the marekt-leading retailer of satnav systems in the UK.
September 13, 2007
Investment Banking feels the Pain
Billions of dollars of ‘sub-prime’ loans to homebuyers with poor credit records have been lost to defaults in the US. This has had a huge knock-on effect in the UK, especially on Credit Derivatives, which have hit the wall due to the fact that they didn’t escalate their risk position. This ultimately leads to lower revenues for the banks.
What does this mean for software vendors who sell in the Financial Services industry ? Short term pain I’m afraid. Projects have been postphoned and in some cases cancelled, and there is an expectation that consultants and developers on contracts will be released onto the market at the end of the year when their contracts expire.
It’s not all doom and gloom, vendors who have products that cater into Commodities, FX. Equities, and Prime Service (Extended Services to Hedge Funds) may still be able to prosper, but in general it could take up to 9-12 months for the market to settle again.
September 7, 2007
TomTom bids for Tele Atlas
TomTom has made a bid to buy map provider Tele Atlas worth around $1.2 billion. Any potential deal would give TomTom a major new revenue source licensing its product to third parties. Google Maps is among the systems using Tele Atlas software at present.
August 5, 2007
Hacking TK Maxx
It seems as if the TK Maxx hacking scandal, where 45 million customers card details were intercepted, was due to poor wireless security. The Wall Street Journal claims that hackers bypassed weak WEP security at a branch of a subsiduary, Marshalls, which enabled them to get keys to the central database.
July 8, 2007
What are Credit Derivatives ?
We do a lot of work for companies in the Finance world, and particularly the Investment Banking sector. We are often asked the “what are” questions from either new staff or from companies who want to understand that world a little better. Given that we thought it would be fund to start a particular “What are” section.
We’ll start gently with ‘what are Credit Derivatives ?’
Credit Derivatives exist on the assumption that there is a market for risk. In a nutshell risk-adverse parties sell on their risk at market price to organisations that are better placed to cope with it. For example, if a bank is concerned that one of its customers may not be able to repay a loan, it might use a credit derivative to protect itself from loss by transferring the credit risk to a party with a higher tolerance. The contract is legally binding and the documentation therefore has to be very robust.
New Chairman for Clearspeed
Clearspeed have announced that Richard Farleigh, former Dragon’s Den Investor, is their new chairman.
Jana Technology Services Blog 