Need for Speed Top Priorities for Senior Wall Street Executives
Alan Greenspan Addresses 200 Top Wall Street Executives at Sybase Executive Summit at NYSE
Sybase, Inc. announced the results of an informal poll taken last Friday at the 2008 Sybase® Executive Summit. Senior financial executives attending the event at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in lower Manhattan, sounded a cautiously optimistic tone when asked how long before they expect to see signs of a stabilized economy.
As the keynote speaker, Dr. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, addressed an intimate crowd of 200 of the most influential people on Wall Street. The theme of the evening was “Navigating through Economic Headwinds.” A survey of executives conducted after Dr. Greenspan spoke indicated that a majority of them expect those headwinds to begin potentially tapering off by the fall. By comparison, a distinct minority feel economic improvement is at least 12 to 24 months off.
While guardedly optimistic about the economy, the same executives currently consider risk management to be their top priority, with more than half of respondents falling into that camp. Coming in a close second was a heightened need for trade management systems that deliver low latency. The need for robust data storage capacity also rates highly, with “very important” outranking “not important” by a ratio of three to one.
When asked to rank a variety of structural changes that are re-shaping capital markets, the majority of executives polled pointed to the emergence of new forms of risk inherent in structured products and mixed-basket portfolios as top priorities. Reflecting the continued acceleration of data streams and processing demands in modern, high-performance trading environments, executives also rated “increases in volume and velocity,” and the associated impact on capacity, performance and cost, as a significant concern.
Earlier in the evening, Dr. Greenspan’s candid conversation with the audience touched upon the mortgage meltdown crisis, the human factor in financial bubbles, and the parallels to past financial crises. The customer panel that followed featured three leading Wall Street institutions and two analysts from TowerGroup and Celent discussing the topic of “Realizing Return on Data, the New Value Engine.” Sybase Chairman, CEO, and President, John Chen, and Ross Mauri, GM Power System, IBM Systems & Technology Group, closed the summit addressing how their respective companies are helping Wall Street by delivering extreme solutions for capital markets.
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