Distinguished Speaker Series

Banking Systems Technology: A Practitioner's Perspective

Kent Seinfeld
Chief Information Officer
Commerce Bank

Attendance is by invitation only
April 27, 2005, 5:30pm
Temple University Main Campus

Summary

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 has been the Chief Information Officer of Commerce Bank for four years.  Commerce is a very successful and rapidly growing bank, based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey with offices in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey.  Kent was a consultant for the five years prior to joining Commerce.  As a consultant, he specialized in enterprise architecture development.  In this capacity, he led efforts to define and establish enterprise architectures and the supporting planning processes at a pharmaceutical firm, an insurance company, a Russian bank, and a Canadian cable and telecommunications company. 

Prior to his role as a consultant, Kent was an IT senior vice president and served in three different positions with CoreStates (Wachovia/First Union) Bank.  First, 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 bankwide client/server systems architecture, computing standards, systems development methodologies and a workflow and document imaging infrastructure. 

Kent was the founder and manager of the Technology Planning and Research group at CIGNA, a global insurance and financial services company where he was responsible for computing standards, security policy, development methodologies, and the research and development program.  Kent was 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 bachelors degree in mathematics from NYU and a masters degree in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania.