CIO: And you talked about being a characteristic of how the bank operates. You've been there 11 years. How was that business alignment achieved prior to SOA appearing on the horizon? Or was it not being achieved? Or was it a struggle to be achieved? Tell us a little bit about the IT environment prior to SOA becoming part of the equation.

Stepper: It certainly was achieved prior to SOA. We read a lot about the importance of business alignment in the literature, but it's a double-edged sword. So for us it largely stems from the funding. Almost all of our initiatives are driven by individual business lines and their appetite for funding, as far as their bottoms-up funding cycle. And as a result you've got teams and infrastructures that are built up specialized to those particular trading businesses. So that was great for time-to-market and agility, particularly in the early days, but [it's] almost antithetical to creating shared assets across businesses.

CIO: What was the need to share information assets across business lines? If that was a challenge, clearly they were getting away without having to do that. What was driving more pressure to start doing that?

Stepper: Success, really. First, we've grown to such a point that now we have different problems. We have problems of being able to scale, to accommodate the growth we've achieved, and [accommodate] the growth we expect to achieve, and cost.

So there's an absence of streamlined efficient operations. You have to have [more and more] people, and that's just not a sustainable model. When our focus was on growth, it was actually an excellent strategy. Now that we've achieved some of the business goals, [the] focus [is] on and scalability. And clearly the cycles-whether it be in credits, revenues, or whether it be in any of the one-time margin products-the cycle of margin is decreasing, going from innovative to commoditized. And that cycle seems to be increasingly shorter. And so there's a recognition that, while we'll always be looking to create new financial instruments and new higher-margin products, that we're going to have to be much, much better at institutionalizing the processing of those.