Unisys Identifies Banking Industry Trends

As ID fraud, privacy and compliance with security-related regulations continue to shake the mind set of how financial institutions think about securing their business operations, experts at Unisys Corporation foresee the following five trends that will help banks and insurers rebuild eroding customer trust, and maintain a competitive edge in 2006 and beyond:

1. Coordinated, "industrialized" fraud attacks will continue to rise causing more government intervention and pushing financial institutions to work together on common standards to fight increasingly sophisticated cyber criminals.

2. Industry consolidation will continue but challenges mount in cross-border deals as financial institutions confront how to intelligently integrate systems built for local economic and regulatory compliance issues.

3. Advances in service-oriented architecture (SOA) and other component-based technology will enable cost-effective, flexible and more intelligent infrastructures, providing a smarter approach for financial institutions to upgrade core systems.

4. Open source IT solutions will rise, spurred in part by growing use of extensible business reporting language (XBRL) and other web-based technology. Banks also will look to open source solutions as a cost-effective way to tailor services to new markets, such as capturing a share of the rising wealth of "unbanked" populations.

5. Growth opportunities in insurance and banking will continue in emerging markets, especially greater China.

"Security - always a top industry concern - will permeate business decisions in ways never before seen," says Dominick Cavuoto, president of the Global Financial Services practice at Unisys. "Greater challenges will mount on the regulatory front, and executives will grapple to understand the true value of customer trust to their bottom line. Securing customer trust with service enhancements is vital across the entire enterprise: from more obvious actions like preventing ID fraud, to other less tangible areas such as streamlining operations, improving acquisition strategies or embracing new technologies."