Theresa Carey

QuickBooks, long the front-runner in the small-business accounting software market with more than 3 million users, will roll out its 2005 line in late November. The product line includes software upgrades as well as a new payroll service. By Intuits count, there are 22 new and enhanced services and products being introduced. Intuits upgrades for […]

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) imposed new regulations late last month on private investment pools, also known as hedge funds. The ruling requires that most hedge fund advisers register with the SEC under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, which includes provisions for securing, managing and archiving all electronic communication, including instant messages. […]

When you think about the insurance industry, one of the last words to pop into your mind is “agile.” Whats more likely is some combination of antiquated, slow, difficult and stodgy. Computerized policy management, from quoting to paying claims, has been part of the insurance industry for the past four decades, but the various legacy […]

The implementation of the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, aka Check 21, which goes into effect this week, means that check handling and collection should see a drastic increase in speed. However, security experts believe it could open up some especially foreboding issues in the financial services industry. Unisys Corp. has published a […]

Something stinks in the insurance industry, according to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Insurance brokers, charged with the task of providing competing bids to their customers, have been taking kickbacks from insurance companies. Spitzer hopes to uncover–and eliminate—widespread corruption in the industry. Lets say youre the human resources executive in charge of putting together […]

Oracle has announced its intention to enhance the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Application Server to be compatible with SWIFT, the industry-owned cooperative providing secure, standardized messaging services and interface software to 7,650 financial institutions in more than 200 countries. Oracle plans to complete the first phase of the integration initiative in the first half […]

Check 21, also known by its full name, the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, was spurred in part by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when millions of uncashed checks sat on airport runways for days. Those unmoving pieces of paper, which authorized the transfer of cash from one account to another, severely slowed the […]

Emerging from post-dotcom meltdown, a clear trend has emerged in the stock market: program trading. One longtime market information provider, HyperFeed Inc., looks to ride this change with its updated ticker data platform and API. Program trading is a term used to describe a type of trading in securities based on relationships between a stocks […]

A brouhaha erupted over the summer when users of Quicken 2005 noticed that Intuit had followed through on an announcement it made in 2000: that it was dropping support for .QIF importing at long last. The clumsy method of downloading a transaction file to a local computer, then importing the resulting file into a financial […]

AdvisorVision 4.0, introduced Tuesday by AdviceAmerica Inc., delivers actionable, personalized and institution-compliant wealth-planning advice using a proprietary, knowledge-based rules engine that can be customized by the financial institution. The program is an ASP-delivered system, though larger financial institutions can host the system themselves if they choose. Advisers only need a Web browser to access AdvisorVision. […]