NZ banks looking for competitive advantage with technology

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 16 June 2009 18:44

Business IT - Security

New Zealand banks are increasingly using technology to implement "countercyclical" strategies to maximise competitive advantage, with the banks last year spending in excess of NZ$450 million on IT services.
 

According to a new study by IDC financial services research arm, Financial Insights, strategic initiatives in the New Zealand banking industry this year will be dominated by operational efficiency, customer centricity, security and risk management.

IDC New Zealand’s Louise Francis, said today that while the study presented banks' initiatives as discrete areas of investment, none occurred in isolation, and it would be vital that a bank's strategic initiatives focused on long-term IT objectives and “are integrated holistically with core business strategies and systems, to provide opportunities for growth beyond 2009.”

Of the NZ$450 million in IT services spending by the New Zealand banks last year, IDC says a large share – 29.1 percent – was spent with the market leader, HP/EDS.

Francis says that New Zealand banks are looking at ways to integrate information from multiple channels, business analytics data, payment technologies, billings systems and customer relationship management systems “to achieve a single customer view and to ultimately form a complete customer experience across all banking channels."

According to the report, IT optimisation and complexity reduction will dominate in 2009 as “frugality compels decision makers to prioritise investments and maximise existing technology assets.”

“Therefore virtualisation, consolidation, service oriented architecture (SOA) and software as a service (SaaS) will receive increased attention,” says Francis.

Other top initiatives identified by Financial Insights included customer centricity, risk management and compliance, security, information integrity and privacy, and core banking transformation.