SIBOS off and running

With SIBOS kicking into high gear this week, it’s hard not to think about the significant changes that have gone on in the banking industry over the past few years. The most obvious reflection of this lies in the key themes of the conference. The idea of ‘rebuilding trust’ addresses how banks can tackle the conflict between reducing risk and bringing down cost while ‘recovery’ looks at leveraging technology to innovate and capitalize on the improving climate. ‘Regulation’ also tops the agenda and will no doubt remain a C-level priority for many years to come.

Tying all of these themes together is the role of technology in helping organizations overcome the obstacles they face. After all, data proliferation, and the need to better manage it, is at the root of many challenges being faced by financial institutions today. For example, our recent survey found that 66% of buy-side firms and 56% of sell-side firms are grappling with siloed data sources.

Looking at some of our recent work, it is interesting to see how financial services firms are trying to tackle these areas. SepSvenska Handelsbanken is using high-performance computing to run core applications for trading and risk management. New regulations around risk in Sweden are leading to more risk scenarios which need to be run so more compute power allows the bank to plan ahead much more easily. Other financial institutions including Citigroup are also running similar projects.

As the event continues through the week, it will be interesting to see the different ways financial organizations are tackling these challenges. Hopefully, we will finally begin to see an end to the stormy crisis clouds and a sunny future shining though.

By Jeff Hong, CFA
Director of Financial Services Industry Marketing
Platform Computing