Bank of New York Mellon Treasury ceo

The Bank of New York Mellon (NYSE:BK) today announced the appointment of Eric Kamback as chief executive officer of its Treasury Services group. Previously deputy head of Treasury Services, Kamback assumes responsibility for the company's global payments, trade services and cash management businesses, succeeding Robert W. Stasik, who is retiring after 35 years of distinguished service to pursue other opportunities.

Kamback joined The Bank of New York Mellon in 1980, and has had a significant role in the growth of a broad range of The Bank of New York Mellon businesses, including mutual funds, asset servicing, corporate trust, and shareowner services. In recent years he has focused on the development of technology-driven products and services, notably in the areas of global mass payments, global remittances and image-based deposit products, and increasing the global presence of the Treasury Services group, significantly expanding its client base in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, as well as the Americas.

A frequent speaker at international conferences and a featured participant at industry roundtables around the world, Kamback has fostered a business-wide focus on industry leadership and participation, facilitating Treasury Services group involvement in a number of domestic and global industry organizations.

Volante Payments Bridge

Volante today unveiled Volante Payments Bridge, its comprehensive solution for corporate treasuries implementing SWIFT messaging and SWIFTNet connectivity. Designed for the challenges of complex legacy environments, extensive banking relationships, high-volume and high-value payment traffic, Payments Bridge provides a cost-effective and quick-to-implement solution for managing payment communications.

Payments Bridge is being demonstrated this week at SWIFT's Sibos conference in Vienna at the Volante Stand B203.
"Payments Bridge cuts through the technical and business complexity faced by large corporate treasuries," said Vijay Oddiraju, CEO of Volante. "Volante is on mission to make the benefits of SWIFT messaging easy to obtain and the challenges of implementation easily overcome. We are glad to extend our solutions to corporate treasuries which are an important part of the SWIFT community."

Volante Payments Bridge is currently in production in the treasury operation of one of the largest corporations in the world. Features of the solution include the following:
-- Support for all SWIFT messaging formats, as well as other payments message standards such as ACH, EDI, BAI2 and TWIST
-- Seamless integration with internal applications, networks and operating systems
-- Complete customizability of messaging to meet unique bank requirements
-- Internal routing logic to direct payments to the correct transport mechanism based on message content
-- Dashboard for monitoring message status, identifying failures, reporting and auditing

US Treasury Seizes Freddie Mac and Fannie Mac

The US Treasury Department has taken control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage companies seen as having an implicit government guarantee. A four-part rescue plan includes an explicit open-ended guarantee from insolvency from the Treasury by providing as much capital as they need. The Treasury have refused to put a figure on how much is required. Tens of billions of dollars in the first year can be expected though.

Both chief executives, Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron have been removed by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, and replaced. Fannie Mae will led by Herbert M. Allison, chairman of TIAA-CREF, a teachers pension fund. Freddie Mac, has David M. Moffett, a senior advisor at Carlyle Group take the helm.

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so large and so interwoven in our financial system that a failure of either of them would cause great turmoil in our financial markets here at home and around the globe,” Mr. Paulson said. “This turmoil would directly and negatively impact household wealth: from family budgets, to home values, to savings for college and retirement. A failure would affect the ability of Americans to get home loans, auto loans and other consumer credit and business finance. And a failure would be harmful to economic growth and job creation.”

Part one of the plan is a pledge to provide extra cash by buying up a new series of preferred shares that would offer dividends and be senior to both both the existing preferred shares and the common stock that investors around the world already hold. They companies can "modestly increase" the size of their existing investment portfolios until late 2009. Thereafter portfolios must shrink by 10% each year until they each total $250bn. Currently they hold $700bn each.

The Treasury Department will also buy up billions of dollars in Fannie and Freddie mortgage securities on the open market.

Financial Objects in e-Portals

Financial Objects, announced a partnership with e-portals Ltd., a company focused on delivering innovative web-based treasury services. This alliance will see Financial Objects integrate e-portals' technology into its Banking solutions, enabling clients to better monitor and manage risk.

As part of the collaboration, Financial Objects will enhance its banking software to include e-portal Ltd's "Exposure Alert" product; a real-time, exposure-tracking desktop suite that alerts users to anomalies during operations. The product consolidates the available data within a financial institution and applies external market data to derive key risk and exposure indicators. The user can then set personal parameters for alerts that they wish to be notified of, including gaps, liquidity, FX positions, hedge positions and VaR.

"A lack of operational transparency has contributed to many of today's high profile corporate failings," says David Carruthers, group technology director at Financial Objects. "The combination of these products means that our clients can be the first to find out about any operational transactions that require attention."

Hal Hovland, CEO at e-portals Ltd., and the key architect of Exposure Alerts believes that technology can be exploited to reflect the working practices of today's senior management. "The product optimises the new wave of Microsoft technologies; designed to use Silverlight and Windows Sidebar® on Vista, or a proprietary program in XP. The product displays risks and exposures graphically, and allows drilldown for more detailed information. It is a perfect solution for today's busy executives."

Users in transit can also be alerted via SMS or to their Blackberry. The product is available to new and existing Financial Objects clients of ibis, ibis s2, activebank and Treasury via a simple interface to the alerting software.

TwoFour Live with New Clien

TwoFour, announced the world’s leading global broker of exchange-listed futures and options, is live with TwoFour. The client licensed TwoFour for its London Treasury business and complete front to back processing across asset classes including foreign exchange, money market, cash management, exchange traded futures and options, OTC options, fixed income and interest rate swaps. Individuals from both firms worked collectively to enhance TwoFour’s product coverage to include interest rate swaps, fixed income, and internal arbitrage, and ended up with an outstanding product that meets the broker’s business requirements while providing the flexibility and scalability they require. The enhancement project leveraged TwoFour’s architecture and Software Development Life Cycle methodology with integrated automated testing and validates TwoFour’s ability to quickly and efficiently help organizations migrate onto their solution.

TwoFour provides a distinct advantage over their previous supplier by leveraging current technology that is designed to evolve as technologies evolve. TwoFour’s flexibility made it easy to quickly configure the application to meet the broker’s specific business needs. Once their required development was complete, the new solution was implemented in just a few months. Activities from the broker’s many businesses are fed into TwoFour in real-time allowing the broker to effectively manage its business as well as its clients’ business. TwoFour provides the broker’s front office with enhanced real-time position and profit and loss information for currency and interest rate exposures to facilitate better decisions in today’s fast moving markets. TwoFour’s integrated workflow and interface tools streamline the back office processing.