Zeitgeist at Sibos 2013

Here at Sibos with my colleagues Gareth Lodge and Robert Mancini, we've been catching up with clients, speaking to industry players about the latest developments, and absorbing the zeitgeist. While no one person (or even three) can even absorb all of Sibos, here are seven observations from the three of us after the first three days of a massive and well organized convention.

1. Value-added services are a hot topic. SAP's Financial Services Network (FSN) opens the way for banks like Citi, BTMU, RBS, and BofA, all of whom participated in an SAP-led panel, to offer valued added services to their corporate clients. Examples include reconciliation, supplier information verification, and cross selling opportunities.
2. Giving more control to end users through more intuitive interfaces is emerging as a theme. ICICI describes large corporates who make payments directly through their ERP system without ever having to touch (or care about) which bank they're connecting to.
3. Banks are expressing a renewed interest in gathering the most stable source of funding out there: retail deposits. Driven by capital requirements, this rumbling may turn into flood, which would be a positive development as it shows a return to customer-centricity.
4. Regulation and compliance continue to be huge consumers of IT spend. While not new, confirmation of the continued pain point for banks only highlights the continued relevance of our general compliance advice: if you're going to renovate your house and gut it all the way to the studs, you might as well put in insulation. In other words, look for the marginal investment that can turn an odious check-the-box exercise into a real source of business value
5. Corporate mobile is of interest to many of our clients, but their thinking, and that of end corporates, continues to evolve. Security around BYOD remains an ongoing concern of conservative IT departments.
6. Banks don't have a real handle on the true costs of many of their activities. Developing this insight is the first step in creating a plan to streamline an overall process system.
7. Last but not least, the momentum behind componetization continues to build. Modularity, which leads to agility and the ability to connect to a wide host of partners, is increasingly discussed and accepted.