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Financial Services

Austin Software Foundry was formed in 1989 (as Intelligent Financial Perspectives, Inc.) to serve financial institutions and other organizations in the industry. Founder Bill Reynolds comes from a background in financial services. In 1987, he was the architect and lead developer for the data extraction and transformation technology that supported what was, at the time, one of the largest transactions involving whole mortgage loans between two financial institutions ever executed.

Austin Software Foundry's earliest clients were financial institutions, investment banks and financial management consultants. As a result, ASF has a long and deep understanding of the application of technology to the financial services industry.

Some of the engagements ASF has completed for its clients in the financial services industry are:

Outsourced Application Development

In the early days of client/server computing, ASF converted an IBM mainframe-based branch bank information system to a PC-based client/server platform and extended the analytical capabilities of the original mainframe information system. The project required the extraction and transformation of data from an IBM SQL/DS database running on the IBM VM/XA operating system to a client/server XDB database running on a Novell 3.11/DOS/Windows 3.1 Local Area Network. The data was transferred via standard IBM SQL/DS dump files on 3420-08 9-track tapes.

The data combined publicly released bank branch deposit and census data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, The Office of Thrift Supervision, The United States Bureau of the Census, The Federal Reserve Board, and other proprietary sources.

The resulting client/server application gave financial analysts the ability to evaluate a bank or thrift's branch network system for office locations, market concentrations, deposit history, market share and branch performance relative to its competitors.

In a development engagement for a major investment bank in the late '90s, ASF designed and implemented a custom, business object framework based on its AdAPT base class library and the Object Management Group's (OMG) emerging Business Object Facility. The objective was to provide a self-contained, business object framework to help developers separate the user interface of applications from the business logic.

Professional Education and Training

Austin Software Foundry has delivered management and technical training to all of its financial services clients in the past 20 years.

Austin Software Foundry collaborated with the program office of a major U.S. investment bank to structure and deliver customized project management training to its internal, application-development project managers. This included the development of case studies and customized versions of ASF's project management training materials to include industry-specific, real-world examples and exercises drawn from the client's and ASF's experience in the industry. ASF was asked to facilitate roundtable discussions between project managers, and to deliver specific information on rapid, iterative, project management techniques. The program office then extended ASF's engagement to include ASF's assessment of the project management culture and process maturity within its financial institution. This assessment was then used to help refine the services provided by the program office to project managers throughout the organization.

Project and Process Mentoring

Austin Software Foundry has acted in the role of project manager, mentor to project managers, and as advisor to project and program offices for its financial services clients.

A large New York-based investment bank retained Austin Software Foundry as a project and process mentor to assist it with the customization of Microsoft Office 2000 for its investment banking partners and staff. ASF also was involved with the subsequent deployment and rollout of the resulting suite of Microsoft Office applications on more than 7,000 desktop and notebook computers throughout its client's offices across the globe. ASF injected process concepts for iterative development and frequent deliverables, combined with architectural concepts using design patterns, to improve reliability of the customizations.

Austin Software acted as co-project manager and process mentor of a project initiated to rearchitect an existing Smalltalk application and migrate the system to Java. The application was an investment management system used by a major investment bank to manage private client funds, their investments, the transactions that make up those investments, and the analysis of the investment performance. Additional features added to the application during the migration were foreign exchange hedging, levered funds, optional investments and indirect funds.