Celent has recently published two core banking case studies that talk about cost reduction by moving to a modern platform: Cutting Cost to the Core:How Philippine National Bank Saved 75% by Moving off the MainframeTipping the Scale: Using Unix at One of the Largest Banks on Earth In the first case study, Philippine National Bank (PNB) [caption id="attachment_1230" align="aligncenter" width="303" caption="Philippine National Bank"][/caption] moved from Kirchman (subsequently Metavante, subsequently FIS) Bankway, a traditional mainframe, CICS, COBOL, batch system to i-flex (subsequently Oracle) FLEXCUBE running on Unix. They were able to reduce costs by an astounding 70%. Celent then conducted a case study on one of the largest banks on Earth, State Bank of India (SBI). [caption id="attachment_1231" align="aligncenter" width="162" caption="State Bank of India"][/caption] SBI has about as many branches as Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase....combined. Yet, this bank decided to run its core system on TCS B?NCS on Unix to reduce their initial costs by about a third versus the mainframe. Operating costs dropped dramatically since the bank was able to drop headcount by nearly 90%! [caption id="attachment_1232" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Headcount dropped"][/caption] If you are interested in lowering IT and operational costs, core systems can enable you to make the scale of change required in today's banking environment.