Maria Korolov

A true financial supermarket has been a dream of firms in the financial services industry. But the dream has had myriad obstacles, ranging from regulation and legislation to plain old know-know. Some firms, expanding outside traditional niches, have found profitability to be a factor of expertise and the efficient application of systems, two competencies sometimes […]

Wall Street firms were Web-enabling applications for several years before the events of Sept. 11, starting with retail trading, banking and analytics. Some firms, including Fidelity and Merrill Lynch, have also made strides in converting their back-office applications to use with Web browsers. But after Sept. 11, as Wall Street began focusing on the geographic

Windows XP is the most innovative addition to the Windows family in years, finally burying the old MS-DOS code base and moving everyone-both consumers and businesses-to the same NT architecture. In addition to being more stable and more reliable, it also allows Microsoft to concentrate all its OS development efforts on one product, instead of

Both IBM and Sun Microsystems have recently announced new high-end servers that mimic mainframe functionality, that hold promise for the financial services sector, but given the mood on Wall Street, their timing could have been better, experts say. Sun announced its Sun Fire 15K server-also known as Starcat-on Sept. 25, and IBM quickly followed up

From the moment it was proposed, there were skeptics. People wondered why the New York Board of Trade-the former NY Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange-needed to maintain a backup trading floor at a cost of $300,000 a year. After all, typically not even major exchanges have such sites. But the commodity market, which lost its

Disaster planning paid off for Wall Street’s financial networks in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster. With redundant systems and quick response procedures, both Radianz and Global Crossing Ltd. got their customers up and running quickly. Radianz has a policy of having at least two different connections to each customer, said CTO Brennan

The courts may have brought Napster to its virtual knees, but other peer-to-peer applications are still alive and kicking-and not just in the music business. Wall Street firms have been getting into peer-to-peer, with applications that let users trade research reports and equities without the benefit of intermediaries. Peer-to-peer, or P2P, systems let the network-as

The rescue effort at ground zero of the World Trade Center disaster has justifiably been the focus of the nation’s attention these past two weeks. But there is another, less visible, but vital recovery effort under way. More than any other industry on the planet, financial services depends on an extensive technological infrastructure, and in

The Code Red worm didn’t do as much harm as expected during its infestation earlier this summer. Although it’s estimated to have cost businesses $1.2 billion in lost productivity, the Internet did not come to a screeching halt and even the White House Web site was able to survive the denial-of-service attack that the worm

Before completing their high-profile merger just after the first of the year, both Chase Manhattan Corp. and J.P. Morgan & Co. responded to the growing possibilities of electronic commerce by creating in-house divisions dedicated to finding, investing in and sometimes spinning off promising technology companies-a combined total of 65 to date. Within Chase’s formidable midtown

The U.S. government may be trying to break up Microsoft’s monopoly through lawsuits, but the real battle over the company’s future is being fought on a different front. It involves a new way of writing software, called Web services, and it promises to make operating systems, the very thing that forms the foundation of the