While researching for this article on Treasury Management Systems (TMS) and with the 2020 tax season around the corner, I was wondering where the word “treasury” came from. It derives from the French word “tresorie” and it was first used in a business context by the The Bank of Scotland in 1658. In a more recent setting, it reminded me of former con man, check forger and imposter, Frank Abignale, who was memorialized by Leonardo DiCaprio and chased by Tom Hanks as an FBI agent in the movie Catch Me If You Can. A Houston Police Chief once said about him: "Frank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States ...
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Table of Contents: Introduction Background Market Summary Current Market Conditions Use Case Competitive Market Government Regulation Bloomberg News Fossil AI's Role in Trading Bloomberg in Disruption Loss of Customer Trust Failure to Innovate Instant Bloomberg Arrogance Help Intro – Here’s How You Can Save 30-93% on your Bloomberg Costs The name Bloomberg conjures up images of the Night King himself, but also of the market dominance in the Financial Services industry, of its flagship product, the Bloomberg Terminal. Just whispering the Bloomberg name also sends shivers up the spines of their customers when they think about the exceedingly ...
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The IT landscape in Financial Services is changing rapidly. Regardless if they want to be industry leaders, fast followers of reactors, the ever-spreading cost base for Financial Services Companies leaves less budget available for capital investments in new technology, driving a vicious cycle of increased operating cost. In the drive to enact transformational change, Financial Services Companies should seek out the benefit from low hanging fruit to reduce current Opex. According to a PwC Global FinTech survey, 81% of CEOs are concerned about the speed of technology change, which is more than any other industry sector. Thousands of startups ...
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Some of you may remember the name Ray Tomlinson. If you’ve never heard of him or can’t recall the name, suffice it to say that he’s had a profound impact on your life. Recently deceased, he is the programmer credited to have invented ‘email’ back in 1971 when he sent an email to himself from one computer to another traveling a network known as ARPANET. Not surprisingly, given Tomlinson invented email, he is also the person who turned the world’s first computer virus “Creeper” into a self-replicating program and then developed a reactionary antivirus program called “Reaper” to delete it. This would prove to be just the first of many thousands ...
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What can be done to maximize your operations strategy. In the mid-1700s, Alexander Webster and Robert Wallace, two ministers of the Church of Scotland caused a major change that would alter the life insurance landscape forever. The plan they devised would invest the revenue from policy premiums and use the income generated from those investments to payout death benefit claims to the families of the insured. Much of the success of the newly-created fund can be credited to Wallace and Webster’s precise use of actuarial science such as understanding mortality rates of Scottish clergymen, along with life expectancies of the ministers’ wife and ...
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It was just a few years ago when a leading global consulting firm noted in their financial services outlook, that the “industry would switch gears from defensive compliance remediation to a proactive search for revenue growth and further cost reduction.” As topline growth stayed modest over the years, banks focused mostly on operational efficiencies to drive financial performance improvements. As an example, they looked for scale efficiencies through rationalizing their branch networks with only mixed results. Banks are very complex organizations, but as IT and Finance collaborate more to redefine their role and value, optimizing IT cost as ...
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Back in March 1991, Stewart Alsop, a venture-capitalist and editor of InfoWorld said, “I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15th, 1996”. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, so we know now, this could not be further from the truth. The mainframe is not only ‘not’ a dinosaur, it may be the single most important technology in the financial services industry, running almost every large Bank and Insurance Company’s back end system in the world. Still today, seemingly only the mainframe can handle the performance requirements & reliability demands of these challenging operating environments and support the sheer volume of ...
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