Accenture Technology Vision 2012: What It Means For Banking

Accenture looks at the major trends driving technology over the coming three to five years—as outlined in the Accenture Technology Vision 2012—and relates them to the banking industry. We identify five action steps for bank CIOs eager to harness these technology trends to generate competitive differentiation on the road to high performance.

Accenture’s annual Technology Vision report provides a perspective on the future of technology beyond the current conversations about the cloud, mobility, and Big Data. This year’s report—Technology Vision 2012—outlines the trends that forward-thinking CIOs will use to position their organizations to help drive growth, rather than focusing on cost-cutting and efficiency improvements.

These trends are:

• Context-based services.
• Converging data architectures.
• Industrialized data services.
• Social-driven IT.
• Platform as a service-enabled agility.
• Orchestrated analytical security.

Read the Accenture Technology Vision 2012 for more about these trends in general.

Accenture looks at how forward-looking bank CIOs can use these trends to drive competitive advantage:

• Galvanize customer interactions with context-based services. Banks can develop their ability to combine real-time signals from the physical world with location data, online activities, social media and many other types of contextual input.

• Generate real-time customer insights from large data volumes. Accenture expects the ability to enrich customer profiles by actively collecting data from multiple sources will be a defining technology breakthrough as banks develop truly customer-centric business models.

• Move beyond master data management. Most banks see data management as a growing challenge. In response, some have created a formal data management function and assigned data management officers who are responsible for data management rules and quality.

• Use social to power product innovation and strengthen relationships—not just cut marketing costs. Banks need to move beyond just experimenting with social media as a marketing tool and develop it as a relationship model.

• Realize that PaaS is more than just a cost-reduction tool. By switching capital-intensive IT to an operational cost model, platform as a service (PaaS) can help banks meet new capital obligations. But its implications are broader, and CIOs must explore them.

• Develop a data platform approach to mitigate growing security risks. Mobility in particular is generating huge new opportunities for banks, but creating new risks as well. Data-centric management and orchestration is needed to help banks adopt secure technologies rapidly.

Based on these insights, Accenture has identified five action items for bank CIOs:

• Prioritize the technology trends. Determine which are most relevant to your organization, its business strategy, and your current situation.

• Significantly strengthen analytical capabilities. Banks will have to enrich their customer profiles with external data, process this information using advanced analytical capabilities, and distribute sales leads through all relevant channels.

• Move faster toward customer-centric business and technology architectures. Banks will have to move to a customer-centric architecture, where they have what it takes to assemble and offer products in real-time, specific to each individual customer.

• Adopt highly agile and decoupled business and applications architectures. Banks will have to develop third-party partnerships to obtain external data for their customers. To facilitate these ties, banks will have to develop highly decoupled, more flexible and agile architectures that allow rapid integration of external data sources without affecting their core transactional platforms.

• Know the limits with regards to privacy and customer’s personal space. Banks will have to take great care to address customer privacy sensitivities for external information sources such as social media services.

Contact us to learn how we can help you develop practical strategies for harnessing the power of these technology trends to achieve high performance.