上周，我接到了鲍勃•阿普菲尔从伦敦打来的电话，他是我在布鲁克林的邻居（也是欧柏林大学校友）。

    阿普菲尔首先说道，“两周前，我完成了希腊债务重组交易。”

    这听起来相当震撼，但并非完全出乎我所料。毕竟，阿普菲尔经营着一家名为债券持有者通信集团（Bondholder Communications Group）的公司，其业务恰恰涉及此事。

    不过这并不是阿普菲尔来电的真正原因。他其实想谈谈其团队为了完成希腊债务重组，所设计出的计算机网络。

    也许你还记得，希腊政府在今年初曾面临破产危机，无法偿还票面总值超过2700亿美元的债务。在一系列复杂的重组交易中，希腊财政部提议仅偿还债券票面价值的一小部分。

    不过，债权人人数众多，数目约为10万人，这些人分别在全球各地——从俄罗斯到南非再到哈萨克斯坦都有。要让他们在如此紧张的时限内签署完相关文件基本是“不可能的任务”。

    阿普菲尔说，“我想做一些与众不同的事，所以我购入了100部iPad。”

    安装有定制的债务重组应用的苹果平板电脑被分发给领导团队，其成员包括来自希腊财政部、希腊交易所（相当于希腊的纽约证券交易所）、希腊银行（相当于希腊的美国联邦储备委员会）及三家负责重组的外国银行——德意志银行（Deutsche Bank）、汇丰银行（HSBC）、瑞德集团（Lazard）——的代表。其想法是使参与者获得一整套分析工具，并能实时、安全的连接到全球清算系统以及全球各地银行的交易清算室。

    阿普菲尔表示：“从准备到执行阶段，金融领导团队的成员有将近一半时间花在路上，与来自欧盟及三巨头其他地方的投资者或金融监管官员会面。显然有必要创建一个能跟进投资家的金融决策平台，而不是毫无作为。”

    I got a London call last week from Bob Apfel, a Brooklyn neighbor (and fellow Oberlin College graduate).

    "Two weeks ago," he began. "I completed the debt restructuring of Greece."

    It was pretty bold statement, but not entirely out of character. After all, Apfel runs a company called Bondholder Communications Group that does this kind of thing.

    But that wasn't the real reason for his call. He wanted to talk about the computer network his team had created to get the job done.

    Greece, as you may recall, was facing bankruptcy this spring, unable to make good on debts worth, on paper, more than $270 billion. In a series of complex restructuring transactions, the country's Finance Ministry had offered to settle for a fraction of the bonds' paper value.

    But getting roughly 100,000 bondholders scattered around the globe -- from Russia to South Africa to Kazakhstan -- to sign off on the deal on a tight deadline was going to be a logistical nightmare.

    "I wanted to do something different," Apfel says. "So I bought 100 iPads."

    The Apple (AAPL) tablets, equipped with a custom-made debt-restructuring app, were handed out to the leadership team, including representatives from the Finance Ministry, the Hellenic Exchange (the Greek equivalent of the NYSE), the Bank of Greece (their version of the Federal Reserve) and the three external banks that managed the deal, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Lazard.

    The idea was to give the participants a rich set of analytic tools and real-time, secure connections to both the global clearing systems and the back offices of banks around the world.

    "During the lead-up to the launch," says Apfel, "members of the financial leadership team were spending over half their time on the road, meeting with investors or financial overseers from the EU and other parts of the troika. There was a palpable need to create a financial decision-makers' platform that could follow the financier – not vice versa."