Rationalising Global Connections to Drive Costs Down, Visibility Up

Over the past fifteen years, investment banks have seen a massive expansion in global connectivity, encompassing hundreds of links to exchanges and buy side clients as well as infrastructure to backup sites.

This complex connectivity infrastructure is business critical, delivering reliable resiliency, but is also very expensive, from hardware to leased lines and exchange memberships. There is, without doubt, both significant duplication and under-utilisation of these key resources.

Have European banks given up on core banking system replacements?

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Despite the emergence of new technology and increasing competition, it seems the replacement of core banking systems is not on the agenda for European banks. Instead, banks are investing in niche IT projects to not only maintain their existing systems, but to introduce incremental changes, which can provide a quick return on investment (ROI) and meet their business and consumer needs.

Are banks slow in taking on the cloud?

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Of late, there has been a lot of hype around why banks remain sluggish in adopting the cloud. As we all know, the banking services industry as a whole is often accused of being slow to implement innovative technology, with around 75 per cent of banks in Europe, for instance, using outdated core banking systems.

In part, concerns over security have created a barrier to the deployment of cloud technologies. These include the lack of visibility into the service provider security measures, the potential for unauthorised third party access to data, plus the lack of control over where data is stored.