We are awaking to a new world order marked by a wave of expectation (if not regulation) requiring greater transparency, more self-sufficient customers with rising expectations, and greater competition from traditional and non-traditional players.

According to a recent Accenture survey of bank executives and private equity firms, the winners in financial services by 2012 will improve the customer experience, reduce non-strategic costs, optimise their pricing and overcome vulnerabilities to risk.

The recent interest among banks in core platform transformation is being driven by factors such as emerging foreign competitors, direct non-traditional (online)
financiers and M&A activity.

Accenture say that banks should start the transformation process by assessing what benefits and savings can be derived from their core platform architecture – determining, for example, how they can lay the infrastructure to enable the selling of bundled products and otherwise increase share of market and share of wallet. They added that banks also need a well-defined release strategy that balances speed of implementation with delivery risk and cost.

Accenture has found that some organisations opt for the “big bang” approach, in which they effectively cut over to all new systems at once. Others find it more appropriate to break up the effort into manageable releases—by product, customer group, branch or other capabilities—to reduce operational and delivery risk.

To fend off growing competition, banks’ technology platforms must also enable them to have a single view of their customers so that they can interact with them more efficiently and profitably.