How important is a modern core banking system, really?

With an ever-increasing stream of digital-only banks springing up around the world, IBS Intelligence ponders how vital is it for these tech-savvy banks to have genuinely modern core systems?

Hats off to RBS

Hats off to RBS (not a phrase you will hear too often). However, given the latest in a sequence of high-profile computer outages the previous week, it was brave to put Kevin Hanley, director of design, services (whatever that means), in front of a roomful of analysts and press at SAP’s Financial Services Forum in London.

Times of change

The pace of change in the financial services sector seems unprecedented. Traditional business models are being dismantled at a rate that, for inflexible incumbents, must be alarming. It is not solely that enabling technology is hurtling forwards, it is also to do with the bigger picture of low margins, heightened customer expectations and increased competition.

Life after Deutsche Bank split?

Deutsche Bank is pondering the future of its retail operations and this might have significant implications for its IT landscape. A number of proposals are currently under discussion, which would see Deutsche Bank selling off its subsidiary, Postbank, and possibly its own branded retail banking business. According to Reuters, Deutsche Bank’s management favours the sale of Postbank but would prefer to keep its own retail banking unit.

Passing on the experience

By this time of year, everyone’s inbox is full to the brim with invitations to attend industry events. Old conferences come round once more, perhaps with a different brand or twist, while new ones pop up. In parallel, you could probably ‘attend’ an industry webcast every day of the week. Where the presentations are sales pitches or high-level repetition of industry issues, with no real answers, that’s when everyone turns to their personal devices and checks their emails – it is a fraught business holding an audience’s attention nowadays.

Blockchain to replace Swift?

It is interesting to compare the agendas of current annual events with those of one year earlier. For instance, in April 2014, Swift’s London Business Forum had no mention of bitcoin or blockchain. Roll forward one year and it was standing room only for its ‘What is the Future of Money?’ session with speakers from an array of companies that probably no one had heard of twelve months earlier (in part because some of them weren’t around then): Coinstructors, NXT 2 Pay, Innovate Finance, COLU and Epiphyte.

Payments: what is going on behind the scenes?

The payments space has been the most frustrating to report on over the years. There is a collective groan in IBS Towers when the big payments conferences come around again. It feels like the same old people talking about the same old things. There will be lots of focus on the high-level issues, including that ‘FedEx’ comparison once more (we can see our parcels at any point in their journeys, why can’t we do the same with payments, particularly as these are electronic so should be easier to track than physical goods?). But when was the last time you heard a detailed case study at one of the events from a bank that has actually addressed and solved the issues?