Two important and broad technology trends for 2012 are mobile and big data. Each opens a new door to run your business differently—both internally or externally with customers. Each is a platform for new innovative applications that help banks reach new customers while reducing operating costs. And each is a focal point and offers specific applications for retail, commercial, and investment banking segments.
Let’s take each in turn.
Mobile Technology
Mobile is driving innovations in a bank’s consumer, business, and process areas. Although, mobile security is still an issue that banks must address carefully. However, the business value afforded by these new applications can transform a bank and its customer relationships.
In the consumer area, we’re seeing three broad mobility trends:
- Mobile apps to access bank accounts on the go–both for consumers and B-to-B customers (such as treasury and financial advice), as well as internal personal productivity inside the bank to process expenses and holiday approvals, etc.
- Location-specific applications that know where customers are and deliver up more targeted offers, promotions, and alerts
- Mobile payment and wallet applications that link location offers with one-click contactless payment for a breakthrough customer experience
Big Data Technology
Big data is driven by the combination of low-cost in-memory technology, the explosion of social data, the need for immediate customer insights, and trading or market behaviour. Banks can now look beyond aggregated data and mine row-level data for the hidden gems that drive better customer insights, risk management, and a real-time view of bank performance. This is driving new applications areas, such as:
- Social financial management, where banks can mine data and use social media behaviours and customer sentiment analysis to communicate directly with their customers or link with mobile platforms to send location-specific offers at point of sale or payment
- Real-time computational risk and finance for completing both calculation and data analysis all in-memory
Removing disk latency and being able to recalculate in–memory and on-the-fly huge complex scenarios will drive new applications and investments in stress test , liquidity, credit risk, and numerous investment banking scenarios . This, in turn, will propel differentiation and faster reaction to market events and provide the edge many banks want in managing information for business value. It also gives regulators comfort that automated data and calculation processes, along with real time architecture, may reduce systematic risk as banks can more clearly and quickly ascertain their positions.
These are just two of the trends for 2012. What do you see driving the technology spend in 2012?
