IBM to help Lankan financial services sector drive growth
March 16, 2010 02:27 pm
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,
