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Welcome to the Microsoft Financial Services Newsletter for Developers. At Microsoft, we’re committed to serving the needs of developers and architects in the financial services industry. This newsletter will give you links to the latest resources, tools and technologies to help build fast, scaleable, secure enterprise level solutions in Financial Services.
Letter from the Editor
Hello,
Welcome to the Summer Edition of the Microsoft Financial Services Newsletter for Developers. I’m Brian Jackson, Microsoft’s Technology Strategist for Banking, Worldwide, and the new editor of this newsletter. It’s very exciting to have this opportunity to speak directly with developers and architects about Microsoft technology as it applies to the financial services industry. To kick things off, I would like to recap a few of the many exciting new developments in Microsoft technology, discuss how they apply to the financial services industry, and finally highlight some of the innovative applications that your fellow financial developers are building on top of the Microsoft platform.
If you had an opportunity to attend the MIX07 conference, then you’ve already seen Silverlight, which is the first new technology I’d like to discuss. In case you couldn’t attend Mix, all of the sessions are now available online, so I encourage you to take a closer look at Silverlight. Using the same .Net programming skills that you’ve honed by creating ASP.Net or WCF applications, you can now use Silverlight to build rich, interactive user experiences that are deployed using the Web. You’re also not limited to Windows clients, because the Silverlight runtime is available for the Macintosh, as well. Silverlight adds yet another powerful tool to the financial developer’s arsenal, and I’m looking forward to seeing how you take advantage of this tool to build innovative user experiences for your customers.
Another recent announcement, Microsoft Surface, represents an additional technology for building new types of user experiences. Surface features a 30-inch tabletop display, with which users interact using natural gestures, such as pushing pictures along Surface in order to arrange them. Surface’s support for complex, yet natural gestures represents a fundamental change in the way we interact with digital content. While not widely available until later this year, Surface promises to provide financial services firms with yet another way of offering compelling user experiences to their customers. How and when this technology lands at the fingertips of financial customers will ultimately be driven by financial developers and architects such as yourselves, working closely with the line-of-business groups within your organizations. However, it’s easy to imagine innovative new self-service options that take advantage of Surface technology.
Finally, I’d like to leave the future possibilities alone for a moment in order to highlight some of the great work that’s taking place here and now, using currently available Microsoft technology. One of the great things about my role is that I get to travel the world and see firsthand how customers are using our technology. OCBC Bank in Singapore is a great example of the innovation I see around the world. OCBC Bank is one of the largest banks in Singapore and Malaysia, with group assets of U.S.$98.8 billion. With an extensive network of over 370 branches and offices in 15 countries, the bank has successfully pioneered an innovative multichannel, integrated approach to customer service. Its new multichannel platform, built on Microsoft .NET Service-Oriented Architecture, allowed the bank to rapidly integrate and extend its banking channel capabilities to deliver Internet Banking, Mobile Banking, and ATM/CRM customer-centric service. This resulted in increased customer base, increased transactions, and overwhelmingly positive customer feedback. With its advanced multichannel capability, the bank is taking the lead in bringing banking to a whole new level of convenience for its consumers that cuts across time and geographic limitations.
Complete case study details are available here. At the Asian Banker Summit 2007, held recently in Jakarta, Indonesia, OCBC and Microsoft were honored with the “Best Multi-Channel Implementation” Award for this project. It’s very exciting to help our customers achieve their business goals using our technology, and even more exciting to be jointly recognized for this success in a public forum. This is just one example of how financial developers working with Microsoft technology can drive business success. Until next time, I wish you success, and I look forward to sharing more stories like OCBC with you in the future.
Regards,
Brian Jackson
Technology Strategist for Banking
Worldwide Financial Services
Microsoft Corporation
What’s New
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The Microsoft code name “Acropolis” Community Technology Preview 1 is a set of components and tools that make it easier for developers to build and manage modular, business-focused, client .NET applications. Acropolis is part of the “.NET Client Futures” wave releases, our preview of upcoming technologies for Windows client development.
Downloads:
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Microsoft Silverlight is a crossbrowser, crossplatform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the MAC OS or Windows.
Resources:
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Announcements
Enterprise Architecture Portal
The Enterprise Architecture site on MSDN was released this month with several articles, webcasts, and opinions on the topic by Mike Walker, Architecture Strategist for Microsoft Financial Services and former Enterprise Architect. Financial Services institutions are ramping up on these concepts due to an increasing need to move to service-oriented architectures and regulatory pressures to have constant technology decision processes, reducing the cost and complexity of legacy assets.
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This site is designed to provide both developers and architects in the insurance industry with technical content focused on the Microsoft Insurance Value Chain industry initiative, as well as links to valuable technical content on the Microsoft platform technologies that enable best-in-class industry partner solutions. You can count on regular updates from Mike Walker, Microsoft Financial Services Industry Architect, as well as more content from Microsoft customers and partners as we build out the Insurance Value Chain technology strategy.
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Recap: Fifth Annual Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference
The Financial Services Developer Conference took place April 25 - 26 at the Grand Hyatt in New York. Besides the chance to network, the 40-session, five-track conference offered the latest news about the direction Microsoft is taking in the financial services industry, using the latest-breaking technologies. If you missed the event or want to download any of the presentations, visit here.
Events
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Connect with like-minded coders at this free, half-day training session from MSDN Events. You will learn how integrating queries directly into your programming language of choice with LINQ can yield incredible productivity boosts. You will also learn how WCF can help you to design distributed interoperable systems with greater ease and maximum control. Finally, you will see how Silverlight makes it a snap to provide Web users with a tremendously rich browser experience. Connect with your peers and get the lowdown on cutting-edge technologies at these live sessions in your local area. Register today.
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Session 1: New Thinking in Data with LINQ and Visual Studio “Orcas”
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Session 2: Building an Effective Messaging Infrastructure with WCF
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Session 3: Light Up the Web with Microsoft Silverlight
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July 17, 11:00 A.M. Pacific Time
This one-hour session, designed specifically for the Solution Provider community will highlight the AMD/Microsoft relationship, and focus on Microsoft’s introduction of Windows Compute Cluster Server to the High Performance Computing (HPC) market.
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TechEd 2007 may be over in the United States, but the experience does not have to end. Even if you did not attend the conference, you can access all of the great training sessions free of charge.
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Resources
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Over the past 20 years, portfolio managers at hundreds of firms have relied on the Thomson Financial PORTIA system to manage investment portfolios. However, as the pace of financial markets has accelerated, customers have begun to look for ways to automate process-intensive tasks. Thomson Financial responded by creating a new graphical interface for its PORTIA software. Users can employ this interface to customize their own navigation and workflows, and can automate common workflow steps to dramatically increase their efficiency, which, in turn, also increases data accuracy by reducing human intervention.
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Progressive, with annual premiums of more than U.S.$14 billion, is one of the largest insurers of private automobiles in the United States. Its internally developed application for managing policies is at the very foundation of the company’s operations. As the company prepared to replace its mainframe-based application -- first deployed in 1979, and frequently updated over the years -- it needed enterprise-grade technology that would scale and provide the flexibility to easily deploy new solutions. Progressive is creating its new policy management application, using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition database software, with development being done using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0. The company’s 45,000 agents will access policy data through a Web-based system supported by Microsoft technology.
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Did you know that you can share your code across platforms and create applications for Windows Mobile using the same skills and toolsets you use to build .NET Framework client applications for Windows? You can start from either and port to the other.
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New Books from Microsoft Press:
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Your essential guide to developing applications for next-generation embedded devices.
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Your hands-on, step-by-step guide to building data integration solutions for the enterprise.
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