BANKING TECHNOLOGY SUPPORTS BUILDING SOCIETY GROWTH

From my unique vantage point of serving both UK building societies and European banks, I can see that societies typically differ from banks in the way they approach technology. Traditionally, mutuals have been very good at maintaining solid and reliable systems to underpin their core business. But where building societies have scored less highly to date compared to banks, arguably, is in using technology to drive innovation.

 

It hasn’t always been this way: Nottingham was one of the first users of e-banking in the world, but it does seem to be the general rule of thumb that this side of the UK financial services market has been slow to use technology as aggressively as their banking counterparts. The opportunity for societies over the months ahead is to redress that balance – not so much by following where banks have gone before them, but in delivering the most appropriate experiences for their own customers both retail and intermediary, so that everyone continues to deliver growth.

WHY BIG DATA IS DRIVING THE INSURANCE SECTOR TO THE CLOUD

market to expand at a compound annual growth rate of more than 31 per cent to be worth nearly $24 billion in 2016, it is important that businesses understand that to unlock the true potential of big data they need to implement a cloud strategy first.

 

 

It is clear that a growing number of business leaders are turning to the cloud to help gain a competitive edge for their organisations as well as looking for new and efficient ways of working. In 2013 a study by KPMG study revealed that the use of cloud dominated boardroom planning, with  42 per cent of UK organisations revealing that at least one-fifth of their total IT spend in the next 12 months would focus on cloud services. However while the business benefits of moving to the cloud may be clear for many, insurers are finding the challenge of marrying data, security and the cloud a tricky one.

SOFTWARE-DEFINED STORAGE SAVING THE ECONOMY

Faced with the challenge of an explosion of data from macro trends like social media, mobile, the Internet of Things, and Big Data, many organisations are faced with snowballing technology requirements and yet declining IT budgets that mean doing more with less.

 

Storage is often the highest single line item in these reduced or static IT budgets, making the strategy of throwing more storage hardware at the data explosion problem less and less acceptable. Many of today’s organisations, such as picturemaxx, University of Sussex and the Institut of Laue Langevin have found a way to step away from such a MESS (massively expensive storage systems) solution and have discovered more scalable, flexible, available and cost effective storage solutions – Software-Defined Storage (SDS) solutions.

Open Source SDS solutions can be deployed in conjunction with industry standard hardware, avoiding the vendor lock-in of expensive proprietary models. This gives organisations the freedom to choose their hardware, ensuring they always get the right hardware their requirements and with the right price.  Democratising infrastructure in this way delivers cost savings of up to 80%.