Microsoft yesterday announced the appointment of Koen Van den Brande as chief technology officer (CTO), financial services, Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). He 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 project managers, architects, software engineers and implementation services teams. There he led the launch of Intellect Suite, a set of products covering retail, private, treasury and corporate banking requirements and created Smart Build, a service- oriented architecture-based initiative across the Polaris organisation 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 spent 16 years at Misys, a retail banking business, covering product strategy and marketing with a turnover of around $200 million. He was product director universal banking at MKI, a Misys company, responsible for integrating Equation, an IBM iSeries core banking application, with Microsoft technology for customer relationship management, retail branch automation, loan origination, trade finance, SWIFT messaging and treasury.
“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, 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.”