During a recent roundtable discussion, GXS and its financial services clients held a rousing discussion about key trends affecting the Future of Connectivity and the complexity faced in serving corporate clients. With representatives from North American and European financial institutions, the discussion aimed to provide thought leadership on key trends affecting financial services innovation.
Prior to the financial services roundtable, the participants received “Your Solution to Pain-Free Corporate-to-Bank Connectivity”, a white paper commissioned by GXS from industry analyst Jeanne Capachin, formerly of IDC Financial Insights and Meridian Research. Jeanne’s white paper served as a jumping off point for the roundtable discussion. Jeanne moderated a discussion of the key trends affecting innovation across financial services segments:
Improving the Client Connectivity Customer Experience
The roundtable participants are dealing with a complex set of connectivity solutions that they are maintaining on behalf of their key customers. Complexity arises from diverse formats, protocols, handshakes and standards. This complexity is driving financial services firms to outsource to third party integration providers to avoid further investment in disparate, one-off solutions. Firms are also looking to experts in client onboarding to quickly get clients enrolled in products and services, accelerating “time to revenue.”
Ever-Growing Regulatory Compliance
Regulatory changes around the global are impacting financial institutions’ ability to invest scarce technology resources in new product development and innovation. Firms in North America and Europe are deep in the thick of meeting the requirements of Dodd-Frank and the Payment Services Directive, respectively.
Evolving industry standards
As regulations are ever-growing, industry standards are ever-evolving. Evolving industry standards can be viewed as an expensive burden or an opportunity to drive innovative change. But in the meantime, financial institutions must support both legacy and next generation industry standards for file formats. This is especially true for banks implementing SEPA, who face a looming February 2014 deadline.
Conclusion
The most important message from the event was this: By working together and finding common ground, banks and vendors can help to take the lead in customer experience, standards development and regulatory change – ensuring that as an industry we deploy technology effectively and manage change at a safe, but aggressive pace.
