In talking to our customers, weve heard three universal business challenges that need to be met in 2010: delivering transparency, increasing efficiency and leveraging networks, says Pamela Marnell, head of product management for SunGard Financial Systems. Increasing regulation and compliance, and investor demand for stronger risk management, calls for improved transparency across the organization and into business silos. The ubiquitous need to do more with less, better align costs and properly allocate resources is driving the adoption of process automation for greater operational efficiency. Finally, as emerging market firms look to expand in the West, and Western firms move further into emerging economies, both need to leverage business process networks that accelerate time-to-market and leverage market connectivity and access. At SunGard we are helping our customers manage these challenges with our deep domain expertise, breadth of software solutions, and global services model.
SunGards top trends and recommendations for 2010 include:
Transparency:
Trend: Risk and compliance data need to be readily available and understood, but exploding volumes of data and legacy IT infrastructures make it difficult to pull together and interpret the information in a timely manner.
Recommendations:
o Unlock the data from legacy systems and across silos to unleash value, through improved data aggregation, data mining, workflow management and reporting.
o Harness and manage rising volumes of data and apply the appropriate analyses for its interpretation.o Weave risk management into the very fabric of an organization to create a culture of compliance, from the boardroom to the trading room.
Efficiency:
Trend: With fewer resources to support business growth, IT departments are under pressure to make smarter use of technology and keep costs down, while improving client service and profitability.
Recommendations:
Firms should invest in:o Business process management, which helps reduce data gaps and processing errors, improve productivity and capacity and enhance client service.
o Software-as-a-Service to better align spend with revenue, access new functionality quickly and add value to their existing infrastructure without the risk of core system upgrades.o Application management, testing and managed hosting via a vendor partner, to free up staff for growth projects.
Networks:
Trend: Emerging markets firms are expanding internationally and developed world firms are expanding into emerging markets as never before. One reason is that, according to International Monetary Fund data as published by Financial Times, BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are predicted to grow 61% between 2008 and 2014, compared with 12.8% growth predicted for G7 countries.
o Fragmentation is enabling second and third tier firms to compete for their share of global growth.
Recommendations: Connect to a multi-protocol network infrastructure that automates financial value chains, links to exchanges, counterparties, regulatory bodies and other ecosystem participants to help firms quickly and cost-effectively do business in new economies.
o Best value is in networks that offer bundled services, such as access to non-displayed liquidity for brokerage firms or the ability to reconcile multiple global bank account balances for corporations.
D.C.