Your two companies are a thousand miles apart. What integration issues will that cause? I don't view that as an issue. Ameritrade has legacy operations on the East Coast -- close to 100 technologists. We have already been operating in a dispersed mode anyway. What's kind of cool about TD Waterhouse is that their entire IT organization, with the exception of five people, is right across the street from our Jersey City location.

What's the biggest integration challenge? It's making the personnel and culture things work well. The technologies are fairly similar. Two or three months ago, we already made the decisions on which systems were going to survive and which would be retired.

How many layoffs will result from this merger? Over the last three months, we went through an objective, performance-based assessment of all 800 technologists between the two combined firms and made decisions there. Over the course of the next 18 months, we're going to go from 800 folks to about two-thirds of that.

As the new CIO for TD Ameritrade, what are your objectives for the next year? The integration is my No. 1 priority. We will [also] be focusing on a data center strategy that's moving us toward an active/active [clustering] approach. That's not something Ameritrade's done typically. We're going to continue to deliver innovative products to our client base. Not doing that is why many merger integrations fail. We're also going to focus on business intelligence in the data warehouse. To do that, we need to improve our data warehouse and improve the sophistication of our business intelligence tools.

What's wrong with your current data warehouse? Just the structure of many of our databases makes it very difficult to correlate. While I'm not looking for a purely relational model, I'm looking for something that makes it easier to lay analytical tools on top. We also want to get to a new level of granularity around the data that we collect on our clients' behavior.