SIBOS 2008 - A few million won't be missed!
This year’s SIBOS event was SWIFT’s largest ever with over 8000 participants from around the world. Traditionally SIBOS is an event where business gets done. Senior bankers and the vendors who service them, spend a week together learning about trends in the industry, cutting deals, and selling product.
As luck would have it this year’s SIBOS coincided with one of the most turbulent weeks in Financial Services history. Bankers read daily headlines like:
Lehman Brother’s with $60B in bad loans says it will file for Chapter 11 after all rescue attempts fail.
Bank of America announces it will acquire troubled Merrill Lynch in a $50 billion all-stock transaction
U.S. government agrees to provide an $85-billion emergency loan to rescue the huge insurer AIG, taking an almost 80% stake in the company
Regulators ban short selling of Financial Services stocks for 10-day in order to slow the market drop.
Treasury Secretary announces a plan to relieve banks of their troubled loan portfolios in an attempt to revive the financial markets
Many senior executives from the top global firms arrived in Vienna only to immediately catch a plane heading home back to “deal with the issues”.
During the week many journalist seriously debated whether the US financial services industry could survive. Given this environment, I expected banking professionals to be in shock and the level of interest in making deals and building solutions to wane. However, in sharp contrast to the pessimism of the media, in the many conversations I held with senior bankers at SIBOS, they were optimistic or at the very least hopeful.
There seemed to be consensus that while the financial services industry has some very tough times ahead, the banks that survive will have to be stronger, more cost efficient, more customer-oriented, and have an infrastructure better equipped to deal with ever the future brings. Numerous banks were actually looking at this as an opportunity - a time for significant investment. At this point, bankers are still looking at IT to help make them more functionality rich, cost competitive and secure in the future. Whether or not this optimism can endure given the market turbulence of last few weeks, we’ll have to wait and see.
I actually had a banker say to me with a wink in his eye, “this is a great time to spend, another few million dollars off the bottom line won’t be missed!”.
- John Hunter, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Adobe Systems Inc.