Top APAC IT initiatives announced for 2006

Stan Beer
Monday, 06 March 2006 00:12

IT Industry - Market

IDC-owned research and advisory firm, Financial Insights, has released an annual report identifying the Top 10 IT initiatives that will have key strategic importance for capital market institutions in Asia/Pacific in 2006.

The report, entitled "Top 10 Strategic Initiatives in Asia/Pacific Capital Markets for 2006: Overarching Themes of Automation and Execution", identifies the first three of the 2006 Top 10 initiatives as:

1. Trade cycle automation and Straight Through Processing (STP) Drivers of STP adoption in 2006 include: expanding capital market volumes, cost savings, improved processing lead-time, and increased regulation. Automation from STP allows for faster discovery and mitigation of errors and reduced financial risk for the firm. 2006 will witness more institutions jumping into the STP bandwagon.

2. Enterprise data integration: today's landscape of highly fragmented data will invariably lead to compromised information quality. The need for information aggregation is becoming more acute and the development of data management strategies that consolidate access to customer and transaction information will be ongoing in 2006.

3. Service Oriented Architectures: SOAs use industry standard software to integrate multiple systems and applications in a way that is efficient and collaborative. Asia is still very early in the SOA adoption curve and organisations need siloed business and IT divisions to collaborate to fully realize SOAs' value.

Li-May Chew, senior research manager for Financial Insights Asia/Pacific and author of the report says, "Priorities this year correspond with the broad themes of automation, integration, and efficient execution. These perspectives essentially marry the technology and business strategy angle of issues that should be foremost in the minds of senior executives in capital market institution.

"Organisations that concentrate on their operational strengths, aggressively set implementation strategies, use trusted vendor solutions to plug functionality gaps, and focus on strategy execution will emerge as winners in 2006 even as competitors watch from the sidelines."