As global banking and regulatory requirements continue to grow, so too does the demand for innovative technology solutions. The days of in-house software development are limited as more and more organisations look for packaged technology solutions that can be easily implemented and integrated to solve real business problems. Keeping up with technology innovations is important if businesses are to remain agile.

Innovation of the Year
This category got the highest number of entries and competition was tough. The judging panel finally decided that Apama had the most innovative solution overall, with BT Syntegra and Intelligent Results as joint runners-up.

Technology to the Sell Side
Winner: Arcontech Real Time Systems

Self-Service
Winner: NCR
The judges noted that NCR is making use of existing, proven technologies to deliver significant value to the Indian marketplace.

Winner: Searchspace
Searchspace’s enterprise-wide approach to fraud prevention uses patented technology that emulates human logic and reason, on an immense scale, automating a range of decision-making functions including fraud. In one bank, Searchspace was able to catch 50% of frauds previously missed while reducing analyst resource needed to investigate cases by 90%. This had a massive efficiency impact and a positive effect on customer retention. Another bank prevented 70% of frauds previously missed. This increased operational efficiency with savings of close to £1m a year.

Winner: LogicaCMG
Logica’s National Payments System was considered highly innovative since it enables banks and financial institutions within a country to make secure, high-value, inter-bank payments virtually instantaneously across the country, and also settles government securities trades in real time.

This year The Banker presents its deals of the year in two ways. First are the deals of the year by category, as in previous years; then these are followed by deals of the year by country, a new feature that identifies the single best investment bank deal in each country.

Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital were bookrunners for GM/GMAC’s $17.88bn debt offering

Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) acted as sole bookrunner for American Tower, Inc.

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs were mandated to manage the inaugural transaction off the covered bonds programme of HBOS