SIBOS highlights pressure on FS IT spend

The week-long banking, payments and standards fest run by Swift, the international financial messaging provider, is well under way, with the 5,000+ delegates in Dubai being bombarded by a host of conference sessions, announcements and reports. The themes of this conference echo those we are developing at TechMarketView and will have clear implications for IT budgets and UK SITS providers.

In Banking, there are three themes worth highlighting; firstly a trend to new sourcing models, with a greater propensity towards outsourcing, partnerships and the use of utilities; second a trend for business units across banks to co-operate and present a unified approach to customers and third the further emphasis on “Big Data” and the consequent burden on banks’ legacy systems (see our UKHotViews article on the Fujitsu/Virgin Money deal).

In Financial Markets, the focus is on the increasing demand for risk management, better audit trails and more transparent trading in derivatives. An interesting announcement is that by Misys as they launch a Global Back Office component for their Capital Markets Fusion offering, echoing Fidessa’s move into post-trade.

In Payments, as well as reports on the progress of SEPA, at SIBOS we have seen the re-assertion of the 50%+ growth in mobile payments, driven by the growth of smartphone penetration. Banks need to keep up in this important competitive area. Yet more companies are entering the mobile/digital wallet market, with announcements from Sopra and Accenture. (TechMarketView subscribers can access our recent report on Mobile Banking here).

The SIBOS conference provides a useful opportunity for bank executives and CTOs to weigh up the threats and opportunities their operations will face. On the flight back from Dubai however they need to work out how they can convince their CFOs to give them additional IT budget!

Posted by Peter Roe at '09:36' - Tagged: payments   backoffice   banking