FOCUS
| Plain Financial Sense from FIS | Issue 2, 2010 |
The impossible squeeze
In the wake of the global banking crisis, banks are being forced to drive out costs whilst, at the same time, significantly improving on their ability to respond to change. They must, after all, make better changes very much faster than before simply in order to remain competitive and compliant.
These twin pressures are putting an almost impossible squeeze on the banks. Something is going to have to give.
What will need to be sacrificed is the single thing that slows down a bank’s ability to respond to change, whilst keeping costs inordinately high: internal IT provision.
Although it is true that many very large banks have internal IT departments that are significantly bigger than most software development houses, IT development is not a bank’s core business.
Isn’t it time for banks to get back to basics and let others provide their IT infrastructure for them?
A good example of this, says Christopher Yeo, is the case with payment processing technologies. In this issue’s Product Focus, he looks at the urgent demand for new processing technologies. He argues for a new strategic vision that enables a much improved payments processing infrastructure and architecture, yet which is explicitly designed to do so without costing the earth.
But it’s not just banks that are feeling the squeeze right now. Matthew Willman says their customers are, too. In his article, intriguingly called ‘The fine line between intuition and intrusion’, Matthew looks at how customers quite rightly complain if they are bombarded with too much information, yet how they also – equally understandably – complain if they’re not kept fully informed on all developments.
Financial institutions need to respond to challenges such as these all the time. Fortunately, from our point of view, it is when the pressure from a squeeze increases that organisations tend to adopt creative technological innovations from companies such as FIS. And often, what eventually emerges is an immeasurable improvement on the situation before the squeeze occurred.
Stephen Overton, Sales & Marketing Director - EMEA
Contact FIS
E-mail emea.marketing@fisglobal.com
Call +44 (0)1923 710123
