IT Infrastructure Strategy in European Financial Services

This report presents and analyses the results of Datamonitor’s latest Financial Services IT Infrastructure Survey. It is based on 196 interviews with IT and business decision makers in retail banking, corporate/investment banking, and insurance institutions across Western Europe.

REPORT HIGHLIGHTS

FSIs are increasingly moving away from a strict cost reduction strategy and are re-focusing on business growth initiatives. As a result, FSIs demonstrate an increasingly “Balanced” approach to their IT infrastructure strategy (59% of respondents), moving away from the “Efficiency” dominant approach which was pre-eminent over the past two years.

Server investments of FSIs will primarily be driven by application-led initiatives (such as changing requirements due to new application systems or increased processing requirements), with infrastructure-led considerations (such as server consolidation programs or the need to upgrade operating systems) being seen as weaker drivers.

The findings show that more than half of European retail banks are going to actively invest in branch renewal efforts, with 57% taking an active approach to server consolidation in the branch and 52% planning to upgrade the bandwidth connecting their branch networks.
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Contents

Executive summary

Introduction

Introduction to Datamonitor Financial Services Technology practice

Introduction to the study

Respondent analysis

Core questions

Business / IT strategy

Infrastructure strategy

Infrastructure cost reduction

Infrastructure outsourcing / off-shoring

Infrastructure standardisation

Infrastructure consolidation

Branch strategy (retail banking)

Server investment drivers

Linux adoption

Decision making

Vendor strategies

Appendix

Complementary research

Contacting Datamonitor
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