When there isn’t much else to choose between brands, customer service becomes an important differentiation, and in financial services the situation has become acute. As regulators continue to make it easier for customers to switch providers, financial institutions must spend as much time keeping existing account holders happy as they do wooing new ones. Issuing apps and making it easier for customers to bank and source products online is a good start, but account holders will soon notice and defect if such moves are really a thinly disguised attempt to reduce costs and close branches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When there isn’t much else to choose between brands, customer service becomes an important differentiation, and in financial services the situation has become acute. As regulators continue to make it easier for customers to switch providers, financial institutions must spend as much time keeping existing account holders happy as they do wooing new ones. Issuing apps and making it easier for customers to bank and source products online is a good start, but account holders will soon notice and defect if such moves are really a thinly disguised attempt to reduce costs and close branches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Business Continuity Awareness Week 2017 is here, and hopefully it will present a fresh opportunity to review some of the cloud’s limitations in this area.Some 60 percent of all enterprise IT workloads will be run in some form of public or private cloud by as soon as next year, according to 451 Research’s latest estimate. It projects particularly strong growth in critical categories, including data analytics and core business applications. Findings from IDC, Gartner and Forrester present broadly the same picture—that the cloud is rapidly becoming central rather than peripheral to general IT provision.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If the financial services industry is banking on blockchain as the basis for new service innovation, it will be sorely disappointed. Blockchain's design principles are completely at odds with those of the industry, and the technology is fraught with flaws that could be catastrophic for financial institutions.I’ll come on to why in a moment. Clearly, there is a lot of hype and momentum around blockchain. WANdisco sees this first hand: We’re increasingly being approached by banks that think this is the kind of thing we do (it isn’t). And why are they interested? Because senior directors and investors have heard the buzz and concluded that this is something they need—that if they don’t seize the opportunity, they’ll miss out. They’re wrong. Banks need blockchain like a hole in the head.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If the financial services industry is banking on blockchain as the basis for new service innovation, it will be sorely disappointed. Blockchain's design principles are completely at odds with those of the industry, and the technology is fraught with flaws that could be catastrophic for financial institutions.I’ll come on to why in a moment. Clearly, there is a lot of hype and momentum around blockchain. WANdisco sees this first hand: We’re increasingly being approached by banks that think this is the kind of thing we do (it isn’t). And why are they interested? Because senior directors and investors have heard the buzz and concluded that this is something they need—that if they don’t seize the opportunity, they’ll miss out. They’re wrong. Banks need blockchain like a hole in the head.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud computing was supposed to simplify IT environments. Now, according to a recent study by Microsoft and 451 Research, nearly a third of organizations work with four or more cloud vendors. It would seem multi-cloud is the future of cloud computing. But what is driving this trend?Some organizations simply want to have more options—using multiple cloud providers to support different applications and workloads mean they can use the solution best suited to their needs. For example, an organization’s core applications may need resilient applications that can run even if local power is lost or that can expand or contract their capacity depending on workload.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense created ARPANET, the precursor to today’s internet. Around the same time, the SWIFT protocol used for money transfers was also established. These are both early examples of distributed systems: a collection of independent computers that appear to users as a single coherent system.Many come to know they have a distributed system when the crash of a computer they’ve never heard of affects the whole system. This is often the result of assumptions architects and designers of distribution systems are likely to make.In 1994, Peter Deutsch, who worked at Sun Microsystems, wrote about these assumptions to explore what can go wrong in distributed systems. In 1997, James Gosling added to this list to create what is commonly known as the eight fallacies of distributed computing. Traditional approaches, which use time-based replication to architect and build distributed systems, suffer from many of these fallacies and result in systems that are inefficient, insecure and costly to maintain. Modern approaches, using complex mathematics such as the Paxos algorithm, overcome many of these significant hurdles.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense created ARPANET, the precursor to today’s internet. Around the same time, the SWIFT protocol used for money transfers was also established. These are both early examples of distributed systems: a collection of independent computers that appear to users as a single coherent system.Many come to know they have a distributed system when the crash of a computer they’ve never heard of affects the whole system. This is often the result of assumptions architects and designers of distribution systems are likely to make.In 1994, Peter Deutsch, who worked at Sun Microsystems, wrote about these assumptions to explore what can go wrong in distributed systems. In 1997, James Gosling added to this list to create what is commonly known as the eight fallacies of distributed computing. Traditional approaches, which use time-based replication to architect and build distributed systems, suffer from many of these fallacies and result in systems that are inefficient, insecure and costly to maintain. Modern approaches, using complex mathematics such as the Paxos algorithm, overcome many of these significant hurdles.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Data is the new natural resource of our time. Information that was previously thrown away is transforming every facet of business as organizations use technology to query and analyze data in real time to help them better understand their customers’ behaviour and markets. Such knowledge and insight is helping businesses make better decisions and improve performance.
Yet for data to be worth anything, organizations must have the ability to store it. With more data being created every 20 minutes than is currently held by the Library of Congress, many organizations are overwhelmed by petabytes (one petabyte is the equivalent of 20 million filing cabinets of text). As a result, companies are moving to the cloud—not only because of its flexibility, cost efficiency and reliability, but because of the impact of “data gravity.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
David Richards