World's top banks recognizing role of IT

BANGALORE, INDIA: The world’s top banks are recognizing the role of IT in supporting growth and innovation in an increasingly competitive market where customer demand is becoming ever more sophisticated, according to Micro Focus, a provider of enterprise application modernization, testing and management solutions.

Every one of the top 10 global banks, including household names like Barclays, have turned to Micro Focus to help them modernize their business-critical applications, the company claimed in a press release.

These organizations and a number of other leading banks around the world -- such as ABN-AMRO, Banco di Desio, DnB Nor, Lloyds Banking Group, RBS, Standard Bank and Standard Chartered Bank -- have adopted more flexible IT environments with a view to improve staff productivity, customer satisfaction and time to market for new services.

“IT modernization initiatives and, in particular application re-hosting, offer organizations the ability to fundamentally change the economics of running enterprise applications. The significant cost savings can then be reinvested in more strategic transformational projects that enable business growth or improved customer service,” said Dale Vecchio, research VP at Gartner.

According to Nitin Dang, country GM- India and SAARC, Micro Focus, “The modern banking industry is witnessing greater business diversification and with the customer taking centre stage, the sector is set to become even more complex.”

He added that in order to gain competitive advantage it is critical for banks to have appreciably better data and sophisticated technology that renders superior intelligence and supports business growth. IT is now a critical business differentiator specially in the Banking and Financial sector.

Micro Focus offers a broad range of modernization and legacy migration strategies that help banks make the most of their existing IT investment in the enterprise applications that are at the heart of their business. Its application portfolio management and application analysis tools provide vital information to identify and maximize the value of applications.

Micro Focus’ solutions enable banks to migrate business-critical mainframe modernization across applications, development and testing to more modern and cost-effective platforms based on Windows, z/OS, Linux or Unix without sacrificing the business logic that makes these applications unique.

“The banking industry is entering an era of intense competition as customer expectations become ever more sophisticated. Whether you’re a high street bank or an investment house, customers are demanding 24/7 access to data on a growing range of devices, which poses all kinds of availability and security challenges,” said Stuart McGill, CTO of Micro Focus.

“The business logic embedded in institutions’ existing applications is often a key source of competitive advantage, meaning they need to find ways to get the most out of these existing IT assets at the same time as developing more agile applications that can drive business growth,” he added.

According a report by Gartner, financial institution CIOs' top three strategic priorities are developing and maintaining a flexible infrastructure, delivering projects that enable business growth and reducing the cost of IT. 44 per cent expect to move more than half their institutions' transactions to a cloud infrastructure by 2015 and 37 per cent expect to support more than half their institutions' transactions on software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.