Finansliv, Sweden: Cognizant’s Vice President of Banking and Financial Services Lists Four Major IT Trends That Will Shape Banking in 2015

“Working with global banks on a day-to-day basis, I sense a lot of excitement across four areas in particular that not only intrigue me personally, but which I feel will further shape banking in 2015,” writes Sriniketh Chakravarthi. “These areas are: digitisation, regulatory compliance, IT infrastructure simplification, and cyber security.” Excerpts:

“Banking digitisation will continue: As enhancing customer experience remains a key focus area for banks, investments in online and mobile first channels will continue to grow.

Focusing on risk, compliance and regulation: Further major regulations are on their way, including Basel III and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The increased regulatory burdens will require banks to take a more proactive, enterprise-wide approach to managing compliance issues.

Simplifying IT architecture and renewing core applications through cloud adoption: In the coming year, banks will seek to simplify their IT systems across the infrastructure and renew many core applications. Banks will continue to drive a cloud adoption agenda. Small and medium size banks will look to implement entire core banking platforms as a service while large banks will look to migrate non-core services such as HR to the cloud.

Enhancing cyber security: Protecting customer assets by managing customer data, authentication, and device security is becoming more important as banking goes mobile first. To enhance cyber security, banks are consolidating fraud management applications and choosing big data platforms that allow real-time analytics for purposes of rapid fraud detection. In 2015, more banks will start treating big data as an important strategic growth opportunity and adapt to that insight by creating new business roles such as the Chief Data Officer (CDO).

As a mature banking market, Sweden is already seeing signs of these trends and customers here expect their banks to use their customer data to improve service and offerings. Swedish bank customers will be pleased to hear that focus on digitisation, regulatory compliance, IT infrastructure simplification and cyber security will ultimately enhance the banking experience in 2015.”

Click here to read the article in Swedish.