Merged bank technologies: When the bride wants her own furniture. (Data processing difficulties in London's financial district.)
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Merged bank technologies: When the bride wants her own furniture. (Data processing difficulties in London's financial district.)

The first thing to be done after the honeymoon is to throw out the junk . . . Junk? That's my favourite computer system . . . And the word "incompatibility" begins to trouble those cosy marriages of brokers, jobbers and merchant banks.

By Tony Shale

The honeymoon is over for London's newlywed financial institutions. Now is the time for the more mundane domestic arrangements and the technical difficulties of co-habitation are proving the hardest to solve. When the merchant banks, brokers and jobbers married in haste, many did not take stock of the technology possessed by their partners or of the requirements of the future. And now they are finding that there is no leisure in which to repent.

Cultural disparity and disharmony between the merged institutions are exacerbating the search for the technological ideal"A long engagement of over four years between Hoare Govett and Security Pacific has considerably eased our problems," explained Guy Kingsbury, director of management services at stockbrokers Hoare Govett, "but partners in the shotgun weddings will be suffering a lot more". The shift in status from employer to employee is proving hard for many of the partners of City firms being taken over by banks. And some of these banks are American.

The London Stock Exchange's rule which forbids institutions taking 100% ownership of member firms until March is complicating matters further. The prospective owners can now only suggest solutions to the combined technological problems, which can be rejected by proud brokers hanging on to their last vestige of power.

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