Regulations, operating costs and back office requirements are draining resources that financial institutions need to focus on core strategic initiatives that will help drive growth and profitability.
To address this, firms are increasingly integrating technology service offerings into their software tools, such as hosting, cloud and managed services, to help them better control risks, manage costs and use resources more strategically.
SunGard has identified global trends driving the growing adoption of managed services to help firms build smarter operations over the next 12 to 18 months:
1. Multi-system environments and siloed infrastructures can slow innovation and hinder go-to market strategies for new products and geographies, which can negatively impact growth initiatives. This can drive investment in trusted vendors for systems rationalisation and a reduction in total cost of ownership, enabling firms to capitalise on third-party expertise and free up internal resources to focus on core business growth strategies. SunGard believes cloud services will play an important role to support this effort.
2. With more capital and resources being diverted to growing regulatory requirements, firms will consider migrating both core and non-core operations to trusted third-party managed services to help control costs.
3. To mitigate operational risk and inefficiencies and optimise system uptime and processing reliability, firms can adopt a combination of software deployment paired with business process outsourcing (BPO) or an outsourced business process as a service (BPaaS) platform from providers with deep domain and industry expertise.
4. Tighter vendor management will be important to financial institutions as they deploy more managed services. As firms continue to outsource more of their operations, they can increasingly rationalise the number of strategic vendor partnerships to create a cohesive network of trusted partners.
Larry Tabb, founder and CEO, TABB Group, says: “By 2016, approximately 50 per cent of financial institutions will use managed services to outsource the management of their IT infrastructures. Due to the benefits of managed services – increased agility, flexibility and responsiveness, faster time-to-market for new products and tighter security – this model will become more mainstream in helping firms address the evolving challenges in our industry.”
Steven Silberstein, chief technology officer, SunGard, says: “Regardless of the size, type and location of a financial institution, many firms will underpin business strategies with managed services models to help address the complex and wide ranging challenges facing the industry. As a result, third party specialists need to offer the security, scalability, global expertise and local presence to help firms reduce complexity, enhance efficiency and focus on business objectives to drive profitability internationally and regionally.”
