December 18, 2014 - Banks and insurers are moving away from perceiving regulation as a cost centre and in 2015 will be using it as a way to shoehorn extra budget for technological innovation within their organisations, according to predictions from business technology change consultancy Certeco.

Regulation gets the budgetary backing of the Board in most institutions, keen as they are to adhere to FCA and PRA diktats. But rather than restricting the benefits that investment will bring to regulation, senior business and IT executives within financial services will be using it to leverage good practice and technological revolution across the piece, focusing on areas that will boost revenue or lead to improved customer service, productivity or cost savings.

Other predictions for the financial services (FS) sector from Certeco include:

• The new era of payments: payments will move into another dimension in 2015 as financial services companies increasingly link with transaction services companies like Master Card and Visa and mobile operators, not to mention Paypal, Apple and Google. 2015 will see Apple Pay finally hitting the shores of the UK and Europe, taking payments to another level.
• The Rise of the Data Czar: banks and insurers have traditionally been terrible at managing and storing large quantities of data but many are now hiring Data Czars, from firms like Amazon and Google, who report directly to the Board. This shows how serious FS CEOs have become about data. But it’s not about quantity, it’s about mining precious nuggets of the right data. Banks need to shore up their expertise and invest in their data analytics and data management skills set.
• Up in the clouds: cloud services will be a massive growth area for banks and insurers in 2015 and Office 365 will start to take off as corporates start to take a punt on these technologies as they become more “stable.”
• On lock down: cyber security will be a growing challenge for financial services in 2015, as increasing use of employee owned devices (BYOD) will bring problems for large and small FS companies. Also, cyber terrorism will increasingly focus on banks next year, with the level and ferocity of attacks building. Banks and insurers will be scaling up their vulnerability management and increasing their defence mechanisms whilst they also cope with increased cloud usage and BYOD adoption.
• FS and outsourcing: banks and insurers will start to outsource reasonably static data like address information, to companies like Experian that store it anyway and usually do so much more effectively than the banks.

Adam Ripley, managing director and chairman of Certeco comments: “Banks and insurers are grappling with a constantly evolving landscape. They have very much been on the back foot in the last five years, weighted down with the regulatory burden, but signs are afoot that they are starting to approach regulation in a much more positive way, looking for the silver lining. They will also be entering a new era of payments – in this environment, partnerships with payments and transaction companies will be paramount. 2015 will bring exciting developments for banks where data is concerned and we will see FS companies really getting up to speed with data issues.”