Closely following the appointment of Chrishan Fernando as Country General Manager of IBM Sri Lanka in November 2009, IBM (NYSE: IBM) is underscoring its keen interest in the Sri Lankan market by urging Sri Lanka’s banks and financial institutions to work with it to prepare themselves for growth in the next decade.
Speaking to reporters in the capital today, Shanker Ramamurthy, General Manager – Global Banking & Financial Markets, IBM Corporation is advising banks in the country to evaluate the use of IBM’s Smarter Banking solutions to manage the disconnect and complexity between an interconnected global financial services ecosystem and the need to analyze rich and varied information sets in real-time.
“We believe that there are three imperatives that are going to force financial institutions to think and act in fundamentally new ways. The first one is re-thinking and innovating the business model. The second is developing new intelligence that enables financial institutions make informed judgments and become much more client centric. The third and final imperative is the need to integrate various types of risk into an overall integrated risk management framework,” said Shanker Ramamurthy.
According to a study done by the IBM Institute for Business Value, business model specialization is a winning theme across 139 financial institutions globally. The survey was conducted across 7000 clients in 13 countries and clearly indicates that banks need to innovate in their business model, mine customer information for deeper client insight and interconnect the numerous risk silos to better comprehend the range of risks and opportunities.
Today IBM offers a wide range of services and technologies that assist banks to simplify and streamline operations to reduce costs and increase agility, focus customer-driven insights to design new products and services, and achieve smarter risk management by optimizing financial and operational risk to meet compliance requirements.
“As more banks and financial institutions in the country interconnect and interact with the global financial eco-system, the onus is on them to evolve and utilise effective technology and systems to remain competitive. IBM is leading the industry with smarter banking solutions that allow financial institutions to balance the three imperatives of growth efficiency and resiliency while also managing profitability in an increasingly complex financial services landscape,” said Chrishan M Fernando, Country General Manager, IBM Sri Lanka.
As part of its Smarter Banking approach, IBM is promoting the increased use of analytics in banks to help develop new intelligence that enables banks to make informed judgments and be more client-centric and focused on the opportunities in advance. The new intelligence analyses events as they happen, requiring a fundamentally new way of thinking about organizing operations and bridging insights and intelligence in real-time from events.
A business analytics and optimization practice conducted by IBM recently showed that nearly half of the financial services executives believe they do not have the right kind of information required to do their job.
In addition to alert modelling and analytics, other services and solutions IBM offers focus on areas such as cloud computing for financial services, compliance information lifecycle management, IT security infrastructure solutions, mobile banking and stream computing for financial services among others.
IBM also offers the IBM Banking Industry Framework which comprises of industry specifics software assets for deploying business solutions faster with lower costs and risks. IBM also provides rich out-of-the-box software products comprising WebSphere Portal, Tivolisoftware services management solutions for financial services, Cognos Information Management solutions and Rational software solutions for banking.
