June 12 (SeeNews) - Digitalization is signalling a deep transformation of the financial services industry across Europe, with new technologies such as analytics, mobile and cloud absorbing a large part of lenders' planned investments, Bart Van den Daele, general manager at Global Technology Services, IBM Europe, said in a commentary for SeeNews.
"New entrants, new habits among consumers combined with changing economies and regulatory environments, are transforming banking services at the speed of light with disruptive business models," Van den Daele said.
In Southeast Europe, earlier this year Bulgaria’s DSK Bank completed the migration of bank's operations to IBM Cloud as part of a long term IT services agreement. IBM is running the bank's IT infrastructure, supporting core banking environment through IBM Tier III Data centres based in Vienna. As a result of this long term agreement the DSK Bank expects to generate up to 20% in annual recurring savings as two if its most critical applications are already running 10 - 15% faster.
Following is the full text of Van den Daele's article:
New entrants, new habits among consumers combined with changing economies and regulatory environments, are transforming banking services at the speed of light with disruptive business models. Consider that today banks face the following challenges:
Less and less people do their banking in branches. Instead they are using their mobiles - to pay, to trade, to do almost everything. Banks need to be innovative enough to charm their clients - of today and tomorrow - without having a branch on every street corner.
Regulators and customers expect banks to be always online
Banks need to optimize cost structures and reduce cost - without outage, without disturbance, without interruption of service and with a bullet proof security.
Heavily dependent on technology, in 2017 banks and financial services organizations in Europe are expected to spend approximately EUR 90 billion on IT with a growing proportion of this to be invested in new technologies such as analytics, mobile and cloud. (Source: IDC*)
Clearly, the rules have changed and digitalization is at the heart of this process. It's the cause and the result of the disruption. It's also a whole new opportunity for the financial industry in Europe. We see how European banks are reacting to these challenges leveraging mobility, security, resiliency, and cloud technologies in order to:
- transform from traditional branch structures towards digital channels;
- embrace the API economy without compromising their legacy systems;
- focus on an end-to-end cost reduction to be ready for anything the future holds for them
- keeping on top of technology trends going forward to anticipate the next big shifts in clients’ behavior.
How to tap into these new opportunities?
IBM helps banks and financial institutions design and deliver transformational digital services and automate processes using its enterprise grade cloud and unique cognitive offerings through IBM Watson. More and more clients rely on IBM to be their services integrator - that is to manage the services and underlying infrastructure in an integrated and unified way through the cloud. To date more than 650 clients have deployed advanced automation capabilities from IBM Services with another 200 organizations expected to join them by the end of the year
*. – IDC: Worldwide IT Spending 2015–2020 — Worldwide Banking IT Spending Guide, CY 2Q17. May 2017 | Doc #US40831717
About the author:
Bart Van den Daele is the General Manager for IBM Global Technology Services in Europe, covering more than 50 countries and helping clients tap into new cognitive business opportunities by rolling out transformational digital services and automating processes. He is responsible for a portfolio of services, including Mobility, Resiliency, Systems and Networking service lines, as well as Technical Support Services and Outsourcing.
Prior to this position, Bart was the General Manager for IBM’s Financial Services sector in Europe. He has extensive experience and deep industry knowledge across all parts of IBM's services business. Bart has been the architect and lead senior executive on most of our large and transformation engagements on the European continent that make up IBM's sourcing and managed services business.
Since joining IBM in 1999, Bart has held several senior leadership positions within IBM's Software, Industry, Solutions and Services divisions. He is President of IS4F, Vice President of BP2I and board member of VTS, joint ventures for IT operations and innovations with Belfius, BNP Paribas and Unicredit Group.
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