As financial products and services become increasingly commoditized, firms seeking competitive advantage recognize that providing a superior customer experience is essential to establishing customer loyalty and continued success.

At the same time, the financial services industry is rapidly moving beyond the era of the ATM and the PC to embrace a wide variety of wireless transactions, making the customer experience even more electronic. To support a burgeoning array of new services and channels, financial services firms must extend the enterprise. Yet as the enterprise becomes more distributed, more networked and more virtual, the operational risks become higher - security, privacy, data integrity, and service level delivery.

Consequently, identifying the right IT architecture - and the right IT partner - is critical. That architecture and partner need to embrace the full application life cycle, as well as dealing with the complex, heterogeneous software, hardware and network environment that typifies the financial services industry.

John Swainson will share his views on how financial services firms can better serve customers by transforming their IT environments, and he will reveal a strategy for achieving this transformation efficiently, without replacing legacy systems built up over decades.

John Swainson is president and chief executive officer of CA and a member of the company's Board of Directors.
During three decades in the IT industry, John has developed a rare combination of management expertise and technology vision that he is applying to the transformation of CA.
Under John's leadership, CA has increased its global presence and focused on its core strengths in systems, networks, security and storage management for the enterprise. John has also leveraged CA's deep expertise and broad product portfolio to define a unique vision to unify and simplify the management of IT across the enterprise.
Before joining CA, John spent 26 years at IBM, most recently as vice president of worldwide sales for IBM's Software Group.
John serves on the board of directors of VISA USA, Cadence Design Systems, and the Ridgefield (CT) Symphony Orchestra. He holds a bachelor of applied science degree in engineering from the University of British Columbia.