Technical Maturity

In today’s economy, even more so than in the past, financial institutions have to justify every dollar spent with quick positive returns on those investments, particularly when it comes to Information Technology initiatives. Savvy retail banks must look at many best of breed technologies and software product companies since you rarely find one technology or product company that can meet the bank’s complete set of requirements. In order to gain visibility and integrate all those best of breed technologies to create a holistic view, the bank must tie all these together in a seamless standards-based approach so enterprise wide business process visibility can be provided for all stakeholders.

The applications that support the day-to-day operations of a retail bank vary greatly – from large monolithic mainframes to legacy client-server application, custom ‘home-grown’ systems and third-party external systems. Consequently, the banking industry has a plethora of technical challenges. The large number of consolidations in the retail banking industry has exponentially compounded this challenge, by introducing multiple and often overlapping product offerings, application technologies and customer service approaches. With similar or duplicated applications and business process solutions, the combined bank must now determine which systems to retire and which to enhance and integrate for future growth with no or minimal impact to the customer experience. As a result, banking executives are now looking at technology solutions to address these challenges while continuing towards the overall objective of growing market share.