The Fox School’s Institute for Business and Information Technology presents the Distinguished Speaker Series, featuring talks by leading professionals on essential business technology topics.
Banking Systems Technology: A Practitioner’s Perspective
Kent Seinfeld
CIO
Commerce Bank
April 27, 2005
About the event
Banking is one of the oldest and most fundamental of business endeavors. While it has changed over hundreds of years, many of the basic functions have survived throughout the centuries. Taking deposits, making loans and facilitating payments are still at the heart of banking.
While not in the business of technology per se, banking has long been on the frontier of the application of information technology. As the concept of (monetary) value has evolved, it continues to get increasingly virtual. It is this virtualization of value that makes it increasingly susceptible to technological innovations. From barter to gold to paper money to credit cards to wire transfer to internet banking, banking is very close to, if not at the front of the line in the application of information technology.
This discussion will explore where banking has been, where it is and where it is going with respect to IT.
Biography
Kent Seinfeld is the Chief Information Officer of Commerce Bank. Kent has led the development and management of systems to support rapid growth at Commerce over the past four years. Kent was a consultant specializing in enterprise architecture prior to joining Commerce. As a consultant, he led efforts to establish enterprise architectures and planning processes at a pharmaceutical firm, an insurance company, a Russian bank, and a Canadian cable and telecommunications company.
Prior to that, Kent was a senior vice president and served in three different positions with CoreStates (Wachovia/First Union) Bank. He was the CIO of First Pennsylvania Bank prior to its acquisition by CoreStates. After the merger, Kent became the manager of systems development for the MAC ATM and POS network. Subsequent to the spin-off of MAC, Kent founded and managed the Strategic Technology Planning group. This group was responsible for the development of the bank wide client/server systems architecture, standards, development methodologies and a workflow and document imaging infrastructure.
Kent was the founder and manager of the Technology Planning and Research group at CIGNA, where he was responsible for standards, security policy, development methodologies, and R&D. Kent has also served as the CIO for Girard Bank (now Mellon Bank/Philadelphia). Earlier in his tenure, he was the principal architect in the design and implementation of a large-scale highly integrated banking system. This system evolved into the foundation of the George Network, one of the first large ATM and Bank-by-Phone networks. Kent has a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from NYU and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Attendance is free on a space available basis for qualified industry and academic professionals. For more information, please contact ibit@temple.edu.
