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For the best in financial sector technology

25 March 2010, Lancaster London Hotel, Lancaster Terrace, London

- a night to remember

The shortlist can be seen HERE

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FST Awards 2010 Shortlist

Best Use of IT in Retail Banking (Domestic)

Yorkshire Building Society
The society is embarking on a business intelligence project to improve management information and gain better insight into every sales channel and product group, from mortgages to savings and insurance. The aim is to maximise opportunities, staff oversight and consistency with a single view, ease compliance and minimise risk and turnaround times.

Barclays – Capital adequacy programme
The bank is using DataFlux technology to run a data quality and governance platform that ensures compliance with the Basel II capital adequacy directive, among other things. The ongoing project has provided a return on investment, met regulatory requirements, and simplified numerous business processes – for instance, it is being used to examine multi-party buy-to-let mortgages to mitigate risk.

NAG – Business lending programme
National Australia Group’s business lending programme is changing the way commercial lending applications are processed at the Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks by moving from a wholly paper-based system to an automated solution.

Barclays – ATM project
With some 3,800 ATMs, this Barclays project was the largest tier one cash machine refresh project in the UK for a decade. It was achieved with a comprehensive automated testing solution provided by Level Four as required, and an upgraded IP network, operating system and software.

HML
By deploying a new company-wide converged voice and data network and IP contact centre by March 2010, Homeloan Management Ltd, a subsidiary of Skipton Building Society, is looking to gain the future-proofed communications platform it needs to enhance resilience, customer service and efficiency.

Nationwide Regional Brands
Nationwide Regional Brands comprises of the recently acquired Cheshire, Derbyshire and Dunfermline brands. It Project Diamond, introduced in collaboration with eg software and training, is a performance management standardisation and measurement programme designed to enhance staff productivity and consolidate working practices.

Best Use of IT in Retail Banking (International)

Bank Hapoalim – Budget management tool
The bank is now offering an innovative automatic budget-management service that it says allows smart, controlled management of household budgets via its website and improves insight.

CECA
The Spanish Confederation of Savings Banks (CECA) has 45 members and 25,000 branches and it centrally provides most of the technology and services. The aim of its recent ‘digitised signature’ project is to get rid of paper waste in branches, cut costs, eliminate handwritten signatures and operate instead with electronic documents where biometric and digital signatures are stored.

Deutsche Bank – NTA architecture
In December 2009 Deutsche Bank introduced a new online banking platform that has web 2.0 functionality and increases personalisation. The New Transaction Manager (NTA) is a service orientated architecture (SOA), achieving maintenance and ‘extendibility’ at low cost, across all legal entities and db brands.

Deutsche Bank – Orinoco project
Orinoco provides a merger-ready SOA framework to enable business growth in the private & business clients division. The goal is standardisation, automated business procedures with quicker processing times, and a reduction in time-to-market for new IT projects or business products.

GE Money Bank
The bank rolled out Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 in its Czech Republic operation, moving to commodity hardware and consolidating all of its disparate core banking, siloed systems on to a single platform to improve productivity and flexibility. It is now looking to virtualisation for further system consolidation with 250 servers so far migrated.

Emirates NBD
The merger of Emirates International Bank and National Bank of Dubai created an entity with $79bn in assets and disparate systems so an IT integration and business process standardisation project was launched. Its’ reduced reporting by half and cut analysis generation times from 3 days to 2 hours. The bank’s also gained the agility to launch new products quicker, rationalised its existing offerings and improved customer service, while streamlining operational efficiency.

Best Use of IT in Wholesale & Investment Banking

EMXCo/Euroclear – Funds processing automation
In September 2009, EMXCo and its owners Euroclear UK & Ireland, launched the first fully automated and integrated order routing and settlement solution for UK fund transactions. This is huge step forward in bringing automation to a key UK asset class, eliminating manual processing and paper, while reducing costs and decreasing market and settlement risks. Customers for the expanding service already include Brewin Dolphin, Charles Stanley, Rathbones and many others.

Deutsche Bank – N-Power Retail
Deutsche Bank’s risk management advisory (RMA) division has built the N-Power Retail solution in conjunction with Luxoft. The global servicing platform, initially launched in Turkey, automates non-performing loans (NPL) management on consumer lending and real estate portfolios for internal and external clients, a key requirement during the recession. It connects all involved parties, including investors, master servicer and direct servicers, bringing transparency to the collections process and allowing portfolio investors to maximise profits.

Deutsche Bank – Opal Space project
The Opal Space project was initiated to build upon earlier work carried out to develop a client relationship management platform that can deliver key performance and risk indicators. The further developments of the global data warehouse have provided an integrated business intelligence eco-system across operational and business domains, including trade management, giving resident applications the ability to share data, services, technology and functionality across boundaries.

Kleinwort Benson
The private bank and wealth manager’s new process management portal, implemented using Lombardi Teamworks software, provides a centralised view of each money market deal and real-time management, eliminating the need for end-of-day reconciliation reporting and rework, making time for more deals in the last hours of the day. It’s cut deal elapsed time by 60% and reduced process complexity by almost a third.

Credit Suisse – Adapt project
Adapt is a graphical user interface (GUI) framework and global environment that provides Credit Suisse with an ‘integrated desktop’ in which users can run various collaborating applications, customised for them and written by different teams around the world.

Best Use of B2B E-Commerce

LifeSearch
The UK life insurance broker has launched a new website called GetLifeRight.co.uk in a revolutionary move to help their customers obtain protection advice and quotes online. LifeSearch’s new white labelled site offers policies from Axa, Royal Liver, Legal & General, and Friends Provident and has been delivered to the market by technology experts 1st – The Exchange.

Origo – Options
It’s long been known that exercising an Open Market Option (i.e. a client buying an annuity at retirement from a provider different to the one(s) they’ve saved with) can be frustrating for consumers, advisors and product providers. The Options project from non-profit firm Origo – working with Aegon as head of the industry steering group – tackled this issue by bringing together 16 competing firms to collaborate on re-engineering the pensions transfer process. Options has increased transparency, eliminated paper and cut transfer times by 80 per cent.

Coverzones
Coverzones is a UK online market and policy management website offering business insurance to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). It was developed to provide an efficient aggregated transactional facility for direct customers and brokers alike, enabling quotations, comparisons, purchases and simpler management of business insurance online.

Calastone
Authorised by the FSA, Calastone is assisting the mutual funds industry to realise the benefits of cross-border straight through processing (STP) and order processing automation, including settlement. Irrespective of a firm’s messaging protocol, size or geographic location, mutual funds companies can transact their orders electronically via the network.

Hitachi Capital Consumer Finance
HCCF provides point of sale finance to UK retailers and their customers. It recently launched the PaybyFinance initiative to online retailers, providing a quick decisioning platform and money for ‘buy now, pay later’ offers, something that until now has mainly been restricted to the High Street. It provides a centralised, efficient and quick portal for online retailers who’re looking to increase sales.

Best Use of CRM Technology

Co-operative Financial Services – Ask a Question project
CFS includes Co-operative Insurance and the Co-op Bank, including smile and latterly the Britannia Building Society. The group needed a customer self-service system on its websites so turned to transversal’s Ask a Question artificial intelligence system to enhance customer service and targeting, while reducing call centre traffic.

RSA
RSA has used predictive analytics software from SPSS, an IBM company, to drive a claimed 15 per cent increase in customer satisfaction, retention and lifetime value. The technology captures detailed data about customer attitudes and uses this to increase satisfaction and enhance new insurance product offerings.

Deutsche Bank – Surface banking
The bank has developed an advisory approach designed to strengthen customer relationships and enrich customer experiences. It uses the new surface banking application, initially in its Berlin branch, to more fully involve customers. The shared flat table-top device, a multi-touch screen and data conduit from Microsoft, responds to natural hand gestures and is intended to help product closures, relationship management and cross-selling.

Best Use of IT in Insurance

Aviva – Ask HR project
Aviva used Transversal’s Ask HR web self-service database to cut the number of calls coming into its phone helpline, freeing up staff for other activities, while still providing the fast, accurate answers that 23,500 employees needed, especially as the firm underwent the organisational change from Norwich Union to Aviva, which involved alterations to the everyday templates, procedures and practices.

Aviva – JML process
The insurer deployed a business process management system recently, in cooperation with Lombardi Software, to overhaul its joiners, movers and leavers (JML) process, which covers new employees, laptop allocations, security passes, etc. The centralised and better coordinated process is now quicker, security risks are down, and asset tracking has improved.

Legal & General Protection Services
Legal & General Protection Services gives administration support to customers and partners and recently installed the eg operational intelligence software suite, incorporating the work manager module, to give it historic, real-time, predictive management information about all factors affecting operational performance, including staff skills, unit costs, service standards and productivity.

Best Trading Platform

Chi-X Europe – Trading advances
Chi-X Europe offers trading in over 1,000 instruments across 22 indices and 14 markets, via its lit and dark order books. Last year, and continuing into 2010, it had a number of innovations including the launch of Chi-Delta (non-displayed crossing), Chi-Vision (smart liquidity consolidation), Chi-Velocity (sponsored DMA) and is now making progress towards achieving clearing interoperability.

Bank Hapoalim – Trading service
Israel’s largest bank has introduced a new international online trading experience for its customers. The upgraded website has sophisticated data and analysis tools to help customers gain a better understanding of the capital markets, make informed decisions and trade seamlessly.

Greenmarket Exchange
Bayerische Börse, operator of the Munich Stock Exchange, offers trading services in approximately 11,000 securities representing various asset classes from over 60 countries. It recognised significant business opportunities in the carbon trading market so recently launched the Greenmarket Exchange, utilising a Trayport trading system.

Credit Suisse – Halo project
The Goman system provides comprehensive order management and trade capture services for Credit Suisse Equities Trading. The Halo module was developed to re-architect it and improve it to meet the capacity and throughput performance requirements necessary in today’s high volume equity markets.

Security/Anti-fraud Strategy of the Year

Cooperative Financial Services – Card security project
CFS is harnessing auto-resolution technology to cut unrecoverable card fraud losses by 70 per cent and achieve project payback in less than six months.

Nationwide – Real-time fraud protection
The building society deployed the Actimize Remote Banking product on its multiple online and voice channels to better protect customer transactions in a world where the Faster Payments Service (FPS) has cut payment cycle times, necessitating quicker fraud detection.

RBS – Anti-malware device
To protect consumer accounts from malware and prevent fraud during internet banking sessions, RBS has begun offering a free web browser security service from Trusteer. To date, 1.5 million customers have downloaded the product free of charge and it has blocked thousands of account hijacking attempts.

Lloyds Banking Group – HBOS credit card programme
Halifax and Bank of Scotland Credit Cards is launching a multi-channel system from auto-resolution technology provider Adeptra to detect fraud in the routine activities customers carry out. The application, which sends out SMS texts to customers to check suspicious activity and prevent ID theft, is helping to catch 86 per cent of this type of fraudulent card activity.

NAG – Real-time fraud protection
National Australia Group Europe, comprising of Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks, has faced increasing levels of internet fraud in recent years, in common with the rest of the banking industry. It needed a strategic, enterprise-wide solution that can detect fraud attacks in real-time to cope with the risks attached with new payment channels, such as the FPS, so it turned to ACI’s Proactive Risk Manager.

Compliance Project of the Year

SMBC Europe
Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) Europe tackles the usual challenges subsidiaries face, such as needing to supply reliable and regular reporting of financial data to its overseas headquarters. These duties are exacerbated when a regime as comprehensive as the FSA’s liquidity risk rules are imposed. To relieve this burden SMBCE installed FRSGlobal’s liquidity solution.

Renaissance Capital
The Russian investment bank operates in Moscow, London and other places where it has to comply with the relevant rules concerning market abuse systems and anti-money laundering procedures so it’s worked with Actimize to introduce a flexible central system that can monitor and detect suspicious behaviours.

Brewin Dolphin
The UK private client investment manager wanted to go beyond the FSA’s telephone recording regulations and also meet the TCF guidelines. Working with Sabio, it implemented an interaction recording compliance solution that captures all calls received or made from 40 UK offices, storing them in a resilient infrastructure so that they can be accessed and recovered easily.

SVB
The Netherlands’ Sociale Verzekeringsbank (SVB) is using Experian’s data conversion service to validate and convert its existing payments database to the International Bank Account Number and Bank Identifier Code standards as required under the single euro payments area (SEPA). The aim in particular is to ensure that its 90,000 pensioners living abroad continue to receive accurate, on-time payments for social security, state pensions and so forth.

Deutsche Bank – Global voice project
The dbServe application addresses all current regulatory and compliance needs for voice recording on the trading floor and provides a platform for future changes, at reduced cost. The result combines efficiency improvements with enhancements to security, compliance and ease of use.

Credit Suisse – Cash flow & liquidity project
This project addresses the primary goal of implementing a new liquidity calculation and reporting system, to be used for both FSA regulatory reporting and internal treasury liquidity monitoring for daily entity funding requirements. It also delivers future flexibility to react to a fast-changing global regulatory environment.

Systems Integration Project of the Year

Newcastle Building Society & Melton Mowbray
NBS worked with Melton Mowbray Building Society to enable them to implement internet accounts and simultaneously introduce a managed services workflow system that scans and captures documents to cut paper. The two projects have respectively opened up a new revenue channel and enhanced efficiency following their integration into the Society.

Airmax Scope Prepaid MasterCard
Fleet technology specialists Airmax Group worked with M2 Europe to provide clients with a transit and corporate payments solution, the Airmax Scope Prepaid MasterCard, which is issued by Newcastle Building Society. The card combines the benefits of hosted telematic data from vehicles with detailed payment reporting, requiring lots of business integration, to provide online fuel and expense management.

LSE Market Data Feed
To provide low latency external market data to its co-location clients the London Stock Exchange Group (LSE) contracted QuantHouse to install an end-to-end data feed solution that now connects to 35 exchanges and multilateral trading facilities (MTFs) around the world.

Deutsche Bank – New PWM platform
The new core banking platform for Private Wealth Management (PWM) went live in Switzerland on 9 November 2009, with further office rollouts ongoing in Asia and other European locations. It’s a single integrated platform with consistent real-time data, which replaces five central legacy systems and 15 smaller satellite systems, requiring lots of integration and development work from the IT team.

Credit Suisse Saudi Arabia – Equities access project
CSSA was formed with a local Saudi brokerage firm and its vendor to gain access to the Gulf Cooperation Council financial markets in Riyadh, Dubai, Qatar and Bahrain. Project managed from London, the equities IT team overcame a number of integration and technical challenges to deliver a new trading platform to CSSA that links into the firm’s global offering.

Outsourcing Partnership of the Year

Chi-X Europe – Data centre provision
Chi-X Europe has outsourced its data centre operations to Equinix to ensure its growing number of trading participants can achieve ultra-fast execution times, in a resilient environment that offers co-location capabilities. The updated London Slough LD4 facility run by Equinix is home to its Financial eXchange offering, which is also used by ICAP and others. The Chi-X partnership has underpinned impressive growth, with the trading venue recently hitting a record trading day of one million orders.

Aegon Direct Marketing Services
ADMS specialise in developing insurance sales strategies for the customers of blue-chip affinity partners, including major banking and financial services brands. Stellar is their strategic telemarketing partner in the delivery of outbound sales campaigns, enjoying a seven year relationship that has recently delivered a BI system that can ‘profile match’ specific advisors, with relevant training, to suit each partner’s demographic.

Investec
Speed to market is a key determinant of success within the structured product market, which is why Investec worked with OPAL to create a technology pipeline solution that can enable product design, marketing launches and full system administration within just 20 days.

Networking / cabling project of the Year

Activ Financial Systems
Activ Financial Systems is now providing market data content and services to its trading clients via the new Atrium Network ‘Exchange Ring’, which provides single point connectivity to European exchanges and MTFs. Offering fully scalable bandwidths, the network 'Ring' is designed to handle large trading volumes and market data volumes, in anticipation of the introduction of a European consolidated tape.

Nationwide – Convergence project
By deploying a company-wide converged voice and data network, Nationwide Building Society gained the communications platform it needed to improve customer service and efficiency, while obtaining significant cost savings.

Fidelity
The networking and data cabling solution for Fidelity’s two new ‘tier 4’ data centres was critical to its success. The Cisco Nexus networking, Systimax cabling and iPatch intelligent infrastructure solution were chosen to give Fidelity more control and enhance the overall technology capabilities.

Best Payments Deployment

Moneybookers Prepaid MasterCard
Authorised by the FSA, Moneybookers, specialists in eWallet digital payments and online money transfers, have recently launched a prepared card solution, which is issued by Newcastle Building Society and operated by FIS. Account holders can now withdraw cash from ATMs using the MasterCard network and make on and offline purchases at the point of sale.

Omnipay
The platform and infrastructure that Omnipay uses to process merchant card payment processing, on an outsourced basis, for acquiring banks is being overhauled with a new FIS IST/Switch and two new data centres, one for backup and disaster recovery purposes, helping to offer more capacity, uptime, flexibility and performance. Payments are now faster, traceable, and compliant with new regulations like PCI-DSS.

Deutsche Bank – SEPA project
Working with Logica, the bank has successfully renewed its Europe-wide payments operations. Its new infrastructure supports traditional payment instruments, as well as single euro payments area (SEPA) Credit Transfers (SCTs) and SEPA Direct Debits (SDDs), while also playing a key role in the bank’s insourcing strategy.

Credit Suisse – FO cash CDS project
Credit Suisse is updating their over the counter (OTC) trade processing platform. A key part involves closely linking downstream trade processing to front office (FO) trade and risk management systems to improve monitoring of the cash position. The new generic architecture can support all trading activity within the OTC arena, such as credit default swaps (CDSs), and can cover credit, rates, or equities asset classes.

Environmental Initiative of the Year

NAG – Green initiatives
National Australia Group Europe, comprising of the Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks, have made a commitment to become carbon neutral by September 2010. To this end, they’ve been working on numerous projects, including managed low power print services, and a desktop programme designed to re-use units and better manage power consumption.

Markit Environmental Registry
The aim of the new registry is to act as a centralised real-time information source for the growing ‘cap and trade’ carbon trading markets, providing greater transparency and provenance for listed trading permits. The registry covers issuance, allocation of a unique identifier, through to the transfer and retirement of permits, enhancing risk management capabilities. It also has connections to trading, clearing and settlement platforms.

Newcastle Building Society
As part of a strategic print review Newcastle Building Society enlisted Ikon Office Solutions to provide a managed print service. It has reduced costs by 50 per cent, improved efficiencies and is helping to lower waste and environmental impact.

Data centre Excellence Award

Fidelity
Fidelity has completed two new ‘tier 4’ data centres recently, the latter facility going live at the turn of this year. The facilities support greater technology demand generated as a result of business growth.

Atradius
Atradius credit insurance, owned by a consortium of financial institution shareholders including Swiss Re and Deutsche Bank, faced the potential exhaustion of space and power within their data centre. The insurer worked closely with EMC Consulting to upgrade their existing facility, extending its life by five years, while improving its performance, resilience and monitoring capabilities.

Best Business Continuity Implementation

Canopius
Lloyd’s of London-based Canopius writes insurance and reinsurance business around the world. It has implemented a new storage infrastructure to improve business continuity and cut storage costs as the company’s reliance on email and the internet increased.

CMC Markets
The firm stores and protects six terabytes of data within the guidelines of compliance legislation, such as Basel II, SOX, etc. To consolidate its backup infrastructure and introduce more flexibility and efficiency it chose BakBone NetVault Backup because it met its data protection and resilience requirements most clearly following a thorough tender process.

IT Team of the Year

Lloyds Banking Group – Group IT
The Business Process Optimisation & Management (BPO&M) team, within the IT department, improve internal procedures and integration at Lloyds Banking Group and have understandably had a busy time of it over the last year embedding HBOS into the business. The team has worked on three projects in particular over the last year, including a new intranet, customer service platform for commercial banking, and integrating the Payment Services Directive (PSD) into the business.

Credit Suisse – JANE project
Throughout the last few years, the IT team of Credit Suisse’s Investment Banking division has been developing and rolling out a new front office, cross-asset derivatives trading & risk management platform, known as JANE, across a number of business lines, products, desks and geographic locations, utilising an internal ‘open source’ style development approach. In doing so, it has aggressively reduced its dependence on spreadsheet technology for risk management, specifically in the exotics space, as is increasingly being demanded by regulators.

Morgan Stanley – Project Alchemy
Project Alchemy was established within Morgan Stanley to maximise the existing data centre capacity in the face of growing computer and storage demand. For the last three years, the Alchemy team has been focused on a series of large-scale global optimisation, migration and decommissioning initiatives. During this time all trading systems, risk grids, corporate systems, client and exchange facing systems, and other key components in London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and elsewhere have been consolidated to New York. In total over 8,000 servers have been migrated, decommissioned or re-provisioned, following strict communication and procedural protocols, with zero impact to the business.

Outstanding Contribution to the Industry by an Individual
This award is at the judges’ discretion and will be announced on the night.

Overall Winner
This category is not open for entry. Instead, the judges will pick what they consider to be the best entry out of all the submissions received for the FST Awards 2010, across all of the categories.

Best of the Best – 10th Anniversary All-time Best Project Award
The FST Awards are celebrating their tenth anniversary this year, so in honour of this occasion we have decided to break open the vaults and go back through our previous winning entries to select what we consider to be the ‘best of the best’ out of all the projects we’ve recognised over the last decade. This category is not open for entry. The judges’ will naturally look at our ‘overall winners’ from previous years, but any noteworthy, revolutionary projects that have changed the industry will be considered. The award is at the judges’ discretion and will be announced on the night.

• If you wish to make any alterations to your project summary please contact neil.ainger@fstech.co.uk.