FTF News is pleased to announce that nominations are now open for the FTF News Technology Innovation Awards 2012. Nominations can be made by any registered subscriber to FTF News (subscription is free). Nominations close on January 31, 2012 and will then be considered by the editorial panel before a final short-list is presented for voting. To make a nomination, please click on the link below and complete the nomination page.

Rarely am I enthusiastic about bureaucratic standards-building processes. But a recent task force report gives me hope that international support for a system of legal entity identifiers (LEIs) is real and will help bring to fruition a key reform for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. Of course, this isn’t the sexy reform that grabs the headlines, but bear with me.

Financial services firms are prepared to spend money on cloud computing for disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC), email and mobile computing as many of them foresee clouds in their futures. But they are reluctant to move key middle and back office functions to the cloud as concerns over security have spiked in the year since FTF News first asked its readership about cloud computing.

Call me paranoid but I see a more troubling cyber-battle brewing in the Middle East than in Washington, DC where pending anti-piracy legislation caused Wikipedia to take a day off. Israeli and Arab hackers have been attacking the websites and systems of stock exchanges, among other targets, and I worry it’s a harbinger of things to come.

Cheryl Nash has hit the ground running since she became president of Fiserv’s Investment Services division this past November. For 2012, she will be the driving force behind major product rollouts from her division. She and her team will be taking on competitors and tight budgets but the most challenging variable is market volatility.