Microsoft Corp has appointed Koen Van den Brande as chief technology officer (CTO) of Financial Services, Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Van den Brande will be responsible for working with Microsoft customers, partners and international financial standards bodies as well as Microsoft product groups on defining and executing its technology strategy across EMEA.
Van den Brande re-joins Microsoft from Polaris, India, where he was president, Product Group and CTO, responsible for managing a team of 800 people, consisting of product managers, architects, software engineers and implementation services teams. While at Polaris he led the launch of Intellect Suite, a set of products covering retail, private as well as treasury and corporate banking requirements, and rolled out Smart Build, a service-oriented architecture-based initiative across the entire Polaris organisation of 6,000 associates focused exclusively on financial services. In 2004 Van den Brande was Microsoft’s strategist for Retail Banking in EMEA and helped define the company’s vision for the bank branch of the future.
Van den Brande’s earlier roles included director of marketing and product strategy for retail banking at Misys Plc, where he was responsible for building up the retail banking business. In his role as product director universal banking at MKI, a Misys company, Van den Brande was also responsible for integrating Equation, a widely installed IBM iSeries core banking application, with Microsoft technology for customer relationship management, retail branch automation, loan origination, trade finance, SWIFT messaging and treasury. The latter was achieved through MKI’s acquisition of OPICS, a leading treasury and capital markets solution that runs on Microsoft technology, whereas all the other capabilities were developed in-house by MKI.
“We are delighted that Koen is back on the team, bringing extensive executive experience, and financial services industry business and technology competence,” says Anders Abrahamsson, the managing director for Microsoft EMEA Financial Services. “His skills will greatly complement the other members of the management team and further strengthen our strategic work and relations with customers, partners and leading industry bodies.”