80% of banks to replace core systems “within five years” #CloudWF

Four out of five banks believe they will have to replace their core banking system in the next three to five years, with nearly 90% in favour of including SaaS or cloud based services as part of the infrastructure, according to a new survey of senior bank executives.

In the report, Invigorating Banking, sponsored by fintech firm Five Degrees and carried out by Finextra Research, the results revealed strong support for core system replacement and renovation. Some 83% of respondents believe their bank’s existing core technology can no longer support its needs. A further 89% believe that it is inevitable that banks rapidly modernise processes and IT to avoid losing market share.

“You cannot become a digital bank without core systems renewal; you cannot renew core systems without using cloud for data management; you need to consolidate data in the cloud to be able to perform effective data analytics; and when you’ve renewed core systems through the cloud to perform data analytics, then you can innovate,” said Chris Skinner, report contributor and independent financial consultant.

Many banks planned to respond by working with new technology providers, even where these have fewer customer references, so that the bank can ensure that it implements standard service oriented architecture (66%). A slim majority of banks still believe that IT is a unique selling point and will continue to rely on their own in-house development teams for niche technology that fits the bank’s strategy (61%). However, banks were split down the middle on whether to stick with their current technology provider, following its migration and upgrade process even if it would not provide the benefits of newer SOA technology (50% versus 50%).

There were also geographical differences in how the banks planned to respond to these challenges. While support for new cloud based platforms was strong overall, it was lowest in western Europe, where only 51% were strongly in favour, versus Asia Pacific, where the equivalent figure was 76%. Yet , across all banks, 97% believe that the bank needs to be able to offer new financial products and services faster.

On others areas there was virtually unanimous agreement. Some 97% of respondents agreed that security must be improved for customers due to the increasing risks associated with multi-channel technology. Likewise, overwhelming majorities supported the need to equip bank staff and customers to a higher level of self-service (97%). Unsurprisingly, 82% agreed with the statement that customers prefer an excellent mobile channel over a branch nearby.

However, there is still a place for face to face dialogue. Responses were strongly divided over whether customers prefer an efficient virtual dialogue over a personal one to solve financial matters (52% in favour, 48% against) – suggesting that banks are far from confident that the branch can be done away with entirely.

A number of obstacles to modernisation were identified in the report. One of the biggest was the difficulty of getting a sponsor at boardroom level (71%). Another was regulation: 67% believe their bank is too busy with regulation and compliance to think about innovation and modernisation. Yet at the same time, regulation also appears to be prompting change, since 92% of respondents believe that modernising their systems and processes is necessary to comply with constant regulatory change.

The threat of new entrants and disruptive competitors rate highly in the responses. Some 77% of respondents recognise new market entrants such as Google and Apple as a real threat that could steal their customers. Most respondents (56%) also felt that the digital only banks like Moven, Simple and Frank are a serious threat. However, the presence of new challenges is not necessarily seen as entirely negative – fully 88% of banks believe that new market entrants have a positive effect on the traditional banking scene by keeping banks focused.

Source: Banking Tech

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The Cloud World Forum will take place at Olympia Grand in London on the 24th – 25th June 2015.

It will feature 300+ speakers, many of whom represent the financial sector, including Thomas Naylor, CIO, Salamanca Group; Oliver Bussman, Group CIO, UBS; John Finch, CIO, Bank of England and many more.

Don’t miss the chance to take advantage of all the knowledge and networking opportunities presented by EMEA’s only content-led Cloud exhibition.

Register for your FREE exhibition pass here!

 

 

 

A Cloud on the Horizon and a Fork in the Road – Pt.1 #clouldwf @ServiceSourceEU

A Practical Guide to Transition your Business into the Cloud – Pt.1

Martin Moran, Executive VP Global Selling Services, ServiceSource

Throughout history, we’ve seen many examples of companies – or whole industries – confronted with the stark new realities associated with emerging technologies and shifting market trends. Faced with strong resistance and insurmountable challenges, these companies needed to make some very painful decisions to reinvent themselves and remain relevant.

Several years ago, both Apple and Kodak were confronting daunting challenges in rapidly changing marketplace. Kodak, the preeminent camera company, was quickly facing obsolesce with the advent of digital cameras. In the same way, Apple faced obsolescence from the personal computer industry dominated by the Wintel (Microsoft +Intel) monopoly.

Standing at the crossroads, Apple and Kodak asked themselves: Where is the market going? Is my existing business model still relevant? Will my employees and sales force adapt to a new culture? Are my internal systems and technologies aligned? And most importantly, will my customers follow?

Apple embraced innovation and made bold moves, rethinking its core business model, culture and internal processes. Kodak, on the other hand, only took half-measures – even though they held critical patents for digital cameras. We know how this story played out within the marketplace resulting in one spectacular success, and the other in bankruptcy.

Today, we’re witnessing a similar transformation within the technology industry. The rapid ascent of cloud computing has fundamentally turned the IT industry on its head. In particular, the legacy software and hardware vendors, which have dominated the past two decades with premise-based business models, are facing pressure by faster, more nimble best-in-class software as a service (SaaS) companies.

As companies increasingly replace application, server and networking infrastructure with cloud services, existing IT vendors are facing a dwindling IT spending pie. Similarly, the cloud-based delivery of software is democratizing the technology spend, allowing employees and managers to whip out their credit cards and procure services from the emerging class of SaaS providers, without going through IT.

In 2012, cloud subscription revenues experienced a whopping 22.7 percent average growth rate.[1] Compare these double-digit growth rates with flat growth for companies whose primary revenue streams today are in on-premise technology and maintenance and support revenues.[2] As companies become more reliant on cloud-based resources and less dependent on traditional IT, vendors are now facing a their own fork in the road. Although the impact on established vendors is slight today, by 2016, the pain will be visibly evident[3].

With an eye to the future, traditional software and hardware vendors are acquiring nimbler SaaS startups, creating new SaaS solutions, and rapidly moving their legacy technology offerings into the cloud. But, are these changes enough to transform today’s technology companies into the successful SaaS companies of tomorrow?

In the next installment we explore how new business models demand new mindsets.

“OTT cloud providers were thinking like media companies, while Telcos were thinking more like their printers…

Our favourite image yet! Notice how the high contrast between the handsets and background signifies the point made in the article…

…. As the printer counts the number of pages whilst the media company counts the audience”.

Jeff Schmitz, Chairman of The CloudEthernet Forum, recently posted a blog on why it is imperative for Telcos to embrace cloud. He touches on how the consumer-centric mindset of non-telco giants like AWS, Google, Microsoft and Apple led to them using the sophisticated infrastructure and bandwidth of telecom operators to essentially converge on these operators’ own market share.

“Today service providers should be thinking at least as much about services as about connectivity – in the way they thought about investments in Internet and mobile infrastructure years ago. Firstly that means looking for new services and sources of revenue. Second, and perhaps more important, it could mean their survival.”

“In 2012 AWS, Google and Microsoft accounted for 40% of all the Ethernet ports shipped worldwide. That gives some idea of the massive investment in Ethernet technology they are making, and yet the total being less than 50% also tells us that not one of these giants is yet big enough to dominate the scene and dictate its own cloud connectivity ‘standards’ for global usage. So we face a possible “platform war.”

What do you think?

Are Telcos held back by decades of standard practice? Are they essentially playing catch up from 6 years behind?

Let us know!

Here’s the full article: http://techday.com/telco-review/news/telcos-must-embrace-the-cloud-2/177157/

Apple and Facebook Flash Forward to Computer Memory of the Future

 If you hire a plane, you can fly over the massive data center Apple operates in the woodlands of North Carolina, snapping some distant photos of the 500,000-square-foot facility that drives the company’s iCloud web services. And if you’re on foot, you can get a little closer. You might even sneak a peek at the solar farm or the biogas plant that helps power this internet engine room. But Apple won’t let you inside the building — and it won’t tell you what you might find there.

It would be nice to know. Like Google and Amazon, Apple delivers web services to hundreds of millions of people across the globe — at last count, iCloud served over 250 million souls — and that requires a whole new breed of hardware and software, stuff that’s far more efficient than the gear inside most data centers. You can think of this as the technology of tomorrow. As the web continues to grow, the tech used by the Apples and the Googles will trickle down to the rest of the world. In many cases, it already has.