Case Studies: Financial Services

Starting in the late 1970s, the Brazilian São Paulo Stock Exchange (BOVESPA) ran its mission-critical applications on ever-larger, ever-more costly mainframe platforms. By the early 2000s, with daily trading volume growing by 50 percent each year, BOVESPA IT executives decided to evaluate their technology investments and infrastructure. Seeking a more flexible approach, they decided to migrate the entire operation to a Microsoft-based environment using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 with Intel® Itanium® 2 and Xeon® servers and ultimately retire the mainframe. Based on early results, the decision was a wise one. BOVESPA is enjoying higher performance, stability, and security and a lower total cost of ownership. The institution is also helping brokers and dealers become more productive, thereby facilitating access to securities trading by individuals and organizations of all sizes worldwide.

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 (64-bit) database, 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 Web-based access supported by Microsoft technology.

IF Latvia, part of IF Group, one of Northern Europe’s largest insurance concerns, offers property and casualty insurance to private and corporate customers in Nordic and the Baltic countries. To cope with anticipated growth due to a decision to expand into the consumer market, IF Latvia partnered with Nexum IT to develop a complete insurance-management solution (IMS) that would reduce the company’s reliance on manual tasks and automate many claims-related processes. Following a design and planning session at the Microsoft® Technology Center, IF Latvia commenced work on the implementation of its IMS. Consisting of an insurance and claims administration back office system, a point-of-sale solution, and an online portal, the new system has helped IF Latvia successfully expand its business. In 2004 the company grew by 33 per cent, and in 2005 it grew by an additional 28 per cent.

"The Microsoft SQL Server 2005 system is very scalable, reliable, and high performance. We made the right decision when we chose SQL Server as our BI platform instead of IBM DB2 and Oracle." Vera Nozic, IT Manager, National Savings Bank of Serbia

"Microsoft SQL Server 2005 will give us a single, central repository for title data across the United States." Greg Christopher, Database Administrator, Fidelity National Information Services