A few days ago at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, I attended a presentation from one of the major consulting companies. The topic: banking in 2020. I heard about big data, the need for real-time analysis of information (in particular from the Internet), and a few other trends. While many of these trends were not new, I could only agree that they would be important in the future, as they align with Forrester’s 2008 research on what banking will look like in the future. (If you are interested in details regarding Forrester’s research on this topic, please see “Financial Services Of The Future: Collaborative Competition Will Be The Norm” and “Banking IT In 2023 Updated,” keeping in mind that 2023 is a metaphor for a longer-term perspective.) However, there was one statement within the presentation that I seriously disagree with.

In 2006, Forrester found that organizational structure, internal enterprise goal systems, and most urgent business requirements were key obstacles on many firms’ journey toward broad multichannel solutions with rich cross-channel capabilities. At that time, a few advanced firms tried to establish a multichannel organization, an organizational layer to coordinate multichannel requirements and solutions between the different business groups and the IT organization. Has this changed over the past five years?

Similar to the past few years at this time of year, we have received a number of global banking platform vendors’ 2010 banking platform deals submissions. While evaluation and analysis will still take some time, a first look at the survey responses shows three interesting aspects:

• The number of survey participants increased. The 2010 survey has more participants than in prior years. A number of more-regional players such BML Istisharat, Cobiscorp, Intracom, and SAB participated for the first time, while CSC and InfrasoftTech rejoined after some years of absence.
   
• Some vendors preferred not to participate. Open Solutions decided not to participate anymore after a few years of participation. And, similar to the past, Accenture, Fiserv, Jack Henry, all invited Russian players, as well as a few others chose to not participate for various reasons.
   
• Success is regaining momentum. A few vendors have been able to retain their 2009 success, while a few others submitted remarkably high numbers as far as new named deals and extended business are concerned.

We still have to see what the detailed deal evaluations will show. However, right now it seems that the banking platform market has at least regained some of the momentum it lost in 2008 and 2009. As always, let me know your thoughts. JHoppermann@Forrester.com.

Our Q3 2010 Global Financial Services Architecture Online Survey shows that 79% of the surveyed financial services firms are either already working on transforming their application landscape or plan to start this effort by 2012 at the latest. The need for greater business agility and flexibility, new business capabilities, and improved ability to cope with changing markets, offer more differentiation, and increase market share are key drivers for a large share of these financial services firms.

Coping with these drivers requires a large amount of architectural flexibility; therefore, architectural flexibility needs to be an integral element of any decision in favor of or against a given architecture or off-the-shelf banking platform within a transformation initiative. Consequently, it does not come as a surprise that 43% of the surveyed firms expect that more than one-third of their business applications will leverage service-oriented architecture and use business services in the next 18 to 24 months and an additional 19% think that more than half of their applications will utilize business services within that time frame.