Weep or celebrate, but banking technology is in fine shape

By Art Gillis

Just two days after I posted last week's blog here, Mitch Betts, Executive Editor at Computerworld, performed a cerebral correlation and concluded that another article sounded familiar. In her recent story, a CW reporter called banking IT "boring." I had called it "dull." Did someone commit plagiarism? Did we collaborate? I couldn't even tell you the reporter's name. And unlike reporters covering Iraq where there is one main event, technology has at least thousands of events to cover. So just maybe there is some truth in our view that banking technology is perhaps leveling off. If you work in IT for a bank, maybe this is a good time to plan your sabbatical. You earned a break, but you better come back with some new ideas. It's un-American to think that there are no new technologies in the pipeline. Eventually the Indians are going to feel insulted that they are the cheap alternative. Maybe they've got better technologies than Fiserv, FNIS, Metavante, Jack Henry, Open Solutions, Harland Financial Solutions and 22 other companies.

If you're a vendor of bank tech solutions, you're ready for rehab. When you come out, you'll feel like you're 30, you're hungry, you want a net worth that will go from zero million to 60 million in five years and you think the year is 2011.

My sympathies are with the vendors. In truth, technology is not over. Tech vendors just don't know where the gold is and instead of pick and shovel, they're carrying a sack full of products that by now are really stale. The new game in town is how to make the folks at the workstations of banks more effective. You figure out the rest while you're away.