Banks choose technology or solutions?

It’s rather a very interesting debate whether banks choose the 'right' solution or a solution thats 'fits' their technology landscape. Though most of the Requirements are driven out of business change, how much of influence does business have on technology solutions? And whether do they actually care?

With banks getting global and larger, there have been various initiatives for a common technology landscape to reduce buy/maintain costs to build a scalable bank. Having fat support teams for IT, Procurement, etc for business, it becomes extremely difficult for banks whether to buy what solves the business problem or buy that fits their technology landscape. And products available in the market with good functional fit are usually not very technologically sound having evolved over a period of time.

So with interesting times, bank’s IT teams could look at the following in vendors who can:

-          Provide more of a flexible framework product  with canned business services

-          Highly portable, scalable and easy to integrate with satellite systems and with Middleware

-          Vendors global reach and support

-          Built-in strong MIS, Reporting and data feeding capabilities

-          Software Sharing/ white-labelling capabilities

-          Offshore customization/enhancement capabilities

 With these factors, sure that we would see many banks in-sourcing more business from other banks and white-labelling their intelligent systems even to their competitive banks. May be solutions addressing business requirements would take lead and technology would struggle to fit the targeted landscape or merge as an EAI initiative.