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FINANCIAL SERVICES

Bank of America www.bankofamerica.com
Pioneer Trading System
Project Lead: Nathan Zhang, Managing Director of Electronic Trading Technologies
Project Description: The bank developed the Pioneer Trading System to provide a high-speed real-time trading platform across its financial trading units. Tapped by more than 200 business users across the globe, the Java-based system has increased the trading volume of the bank's busiest desks by a factor of 10. [ Readthe full Bank of America finalist profile | See Top 10 Finalists slideshow ]

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CAN www.can.es
Bolstering Branch-Office Support
Project Lead: Gabriel Morote, Organization & IS Manager
Project Description: CAN launched an ITIL-based initiative to improve IT support at the bank's branch offices. The bank teamed up with CA to design and implement an incident management, problem management, and change management system, rolling out two servers to provide support to more than 2,000 employees.

Capital One www.capitalone.com
Harnessing the Power of VoIP
Project Lead: Robert Turner, SVP of Enterprise Technology Operations
Project Description: Under the aegis of its Future of Work initiative, the diversified financial services company rolled out VoIP companywide, providing employees with much-needed mobility, while reducing cost and increasing "employee density" -- which the company expects will keep it from having to overcommit to future real estate investments. [ Read the full Capital One finalist profile | See Top 10 Finalists slideshow ]

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Credit Suisse www.credit-suisse.com
Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Portal
Project Lead: Gil Zeilberger, Director, CTO Prime Services Group
Project Description: In response to the need for centralized visibility and oversight of application-level access rights, Credit Suisse's Prime Services Technology in partnership with the Central Infrastructure team created a centralized, fine-grained access control solution for its Prime Services hedge fund portal. Rather than custom-coding entitlements into applications, Credit Suisse sought a more flexible, secure, and reliable method of managing entitlements. The project was completed in compliance with the XACML standard and was crafted to support and be compliant with SOA standards and architecture principles. To secure the hedge fund portal, which runs on BEA WebLogic, the team integrated Securent's Entitlement Management Solution into its Java and .Net applications and into the company's heterogeneous IT stack.

E-Trade Financial www.etrade.com
E-Trade Financial Security Program
Project Lead: Greg Framke, Managing Director and Chief Information Officer
Project Description: In partnership with RSA, E-Trade created Digital Security ID, a two-factor authentication security solution. Based on RSA Cyota, the solution estimates risk for each transaction in real time, requesting additional authentication credentials for high-risk transactions, and helps enable E-Trade to provide its customers with fraud coverage, as well as payment and privacy protection.

Opal Future Technologies www.opaltech.co.il
Consolidate Eight Pension Funds Using Portal
Project Lead: Alex Libis, Information and Data Security Manager
Project Description: The company consolidated management and CRM for eight separate pension funds, each with its own technology base, transforming a chaotic constellation of functionalities into an opportunity to revolutionize both code and customer service. [ Read the full Opal finalist profile | See Top 10 Finalists slideshow ]

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Raymond James Financial www.raymondjames.com
Centralized Document Management
Project Lead: Sue Desiderio, Manager, Software Engineering
Project Description: Raymond James Financial, a Florida-based diversified holding company, built a customized, Web-based document management system to establish a centralized repository for all IT project documents and artifacts. Built using Borland StarTeam as a foundation, StarPoint was integrated with Microsoft SharePoint to manage technical change requests and ensure compliance with regulatory mandates. The system also acts as a code repository for more than 450 IT projects in support of the firm's 1.6 million financial accounts throughout the world.

Scarborough Building Society www.scarboroughbs.co.uk
Mainframe and Database Migration
Project Lead: Kevin Moran, IT Director
Project Description: Scarborough's IT group migrated the building society's legacy IDMS database and applications to Microsoft SQL Sever 2005 and the .Net Framework as part of a comprehensive modernization effort that included replacing a Fujitsu mainframe with Windows Server 2003 systems. More than a million lines of code were migrated to .Net, including homegrown line-of-business applications for mortgage and savings account administration, mortgage insurance renewals, and branch cashiering.

Stonebridge Bank www.stonebridgebank.com
Server Virtualization
Project Lead: George Rapp, Senior Vice President of IT
Project Description: Having maxed out the rack space and power and cooling capabilities of its datacenter, the Pennsylvania-based bank embraced server virtualization, consolidating 131 servers down to 26. By connecting the resultant VMware ESX server environment via SAN, the bank has reduced its data management costs from $230 per server per month to $31. All told, the project has freed up 60 percent of its rack space and has reduced UPS use to 37 percent of capacity.

SunTrust Bank www.suntrust.com
Configuration Policy Review Project
Project Lead: Tim Baker, Manager, Network Management and Support
Project Description: SunTrust launched a configuration policy review initiative to improve customer support, comply with internal audit requests, consolidate device management across disparate datacenters, and deliver increased cost savings to the financial holdings company's bottom line. The project, based on network automation software from HP (formerly Opsware), affected 6,600 network devices and three datacenters; facilitated the provisioning of a new datacenter in three hours, as opposed to four days; and resulted in $300,000 savings.

TransUnion www.transunion.com
Advanced Analytics Project
Project Lead: Peter Hoversten, CIO
Project Description: Faced with a $2 million investment to increase capacity or a potentially risky overhaul, TransUnion rebuilt its existing mainframe system, establishing an ETL (extract, transform, load) tool to process approximately 3TB of data in mainframe-based datasets and forward it along to Sybase IQ for loading. The system reduces complex query results by 83 percent, saving TransUnion millions of dollars by eliminating the need for overflow CPUs in an effort to maintain customer service level agreements.