This was an interesting posting from a survey conducted by SAP and Accenture. There were some great quotes in this:
"Seventy percent of bank executives surveyed said flexibility was the biggest problem hindering the success of their core banking systems."
- Flexibility presumeably means being able to add new products and services, respond to new regulations, add branches, merge with other banks etc. quickly and cost-effectively
- Providing a core decisioning platform, using business rules management systems, would seem to be an obvious way to both increase flexibility (a key business rules benefit) and to do so without forcing a replacement of the whole backbone - see Giving Your Mainframe a New Brain elsewhere in this blog.
"Fierce competitive dynamics and the necessity to keep pace with new products and to strengthen customer relationships will motivate banks to significantly rethink and revamp their IT architecture over the next decade.", Octavio Marenzi, CEO, Celent
- This quote seems to me to summarize the value of an Enterprise Decision Management approach. Business rules give you the flexibility to keep pace in a fast changing world while precictive analytics are key to figuring out how to improve your customer relationships - see Analytics + CRM = happiness for instance.
"This survey points to the need for leading banks to simplify their internal operations, equipping themselves with core systems that use flexible, robust, future-oriented IT architecture that is service-oriented"
- As banks work to move to this kind of service-oriented architecture it becomes easier and more valuable to integrate decision services into this architecture to add flexibility and responsiveness. I wrote a little on SOA and business rules elsewhere.
So this survey seems to me to show why EDM, business rules and predictive analytics will be key technologies as banks innovate their core systems.
