Despite tight budgets, banks will still spend on technologies that allow them to blunt the adverse effects of the crisis, build business despite the slowdown, and operate efficiently in a crisis environment.
This is according to independent research and advisory firm Financial Insights, an IDC company, that has today released its report, 'Asia/Pacific Banking in 2009: Opportunities amid a Crisis'.
A restructure of the insurance company's wealth management and technology team and an overhaul of computing processes had begun to reap rewards, according to its chief information officer Greg Booker.
Tje joint venture between Netherlands-based ING and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group has announced that its 2400 local staff would survive a cull of 7000 ING employees worldwide.
While 2007 and the early months of 2008 saw banks focus mainly on growing market share, 2009 will instead see financial houses in the Asia Pacific channel their IT resources into surviving the current economic crisis, according to a report by research firm Financial Insights.
Noting that the Asia Pacific will continue to be an important region for banks, due to its large domestic markets, recent wealth accumulation, relatively stringent economic and corporate regulations and pockets of under-served banking segments, the report stated that banks in the region will be devising counter-cyclical technology initiatives to cope with the downturn. Such initiatives include portfolio analytics, asset-liability management and credit collections and recovery.
Anyone daring to hope for better financial news from IT vendors this week has been sorely disappointed, as the financial report season continues with layoff announcements by SAP, IBM, Sprint, AOL, Citrix, Texas Instruments and Eastman Kodak, as well as losses and revenue declines.
Citing a turbulent market, few tech companies offered sales forecasts, and most of those that did revised figures downward.
A global study by security vendor McAfee suggests the global recession is putting vital information at risk.
An increasing number of cash-strapped employees are using their access rights to to steal corporate data. As the global recession continues and legitimate work disappears, desperate job seekers are stealing corporate data to make themselves more valuable in the job market, says McAfee.
SAP Australia New Zealand reports a record year of growth in 2008, boosted it says by sales in the retail, utilities and mining industries.
In a press statement, SAP says overall revenues grew 36 per cent in Australia and 22 per cent in New Zealand. Software licence revenue grew 79 per cent year on year in Australia and 20 per cent in New Zealand.
Softening advertising spending and plummeting business and consumer
confidence have dealt new blows to some of the world's biggest
The International Air Transport Association has set aggressive new information technology-led savings targets as the faltering global economy threatens to drag aviation industry revenue down as much as $US35 billion this year.
The fresh plan, finalised in late 2008, could cut industry costs by an additional US$3.7 billion a year if carriers succeeded in eliminating all paper documents used in shipping goods by air.
The Asia Pacific region recorded the worst PC shipment growth since the IT advisory firm Gartner started its PC statistics research, up just 1.8 percent over the same quarter the previous year. This amounted to the volume reaching 19.5 million units.
The China and India PC markets accounted for approximately 65 percent of the market in the Asia Pacific in the fourth quarter, and these countries were affected by a slow consumer market. PC shipments in China grew an estimated 0.8 percent, and 2.2 percent in India.
Anyone who reads the headlines these days knows the world is an uncertain place. And 2009 will be one that brings even more changes and uncertainty, according Control Risks, an independent, specialist risk consultancy.
At this time of year, journalists love to compose lists to fill demand for content that can be rolled out at some point in the media dog days over the festive period, even if the writers themselves have disappeared off on holiday. Nothing wrong with that, so here is ours, but in the form of an antidote, suggesting some things that won't happen next year.
5. Broad deployment of business intelligence tools. Lots of people think that BI tools will be deployed on more desktops so end-users can better understand trends -- and, naturally, BI vendors are keen to expand from their executive customer base. But BI is advanced software for advanced people and giving full-scale analysis tools to the troops is a bit like providing a Howitzer to get rid of a mouse -- silly and really quite dangerous too. Making the tools cheap and more usable is just marketing department window dressing.
Australia and New Zealand Banking Group chairman Charles Goode
Beverage group Coca-Cola Amatil is considering turning up the wick on
its $65 million business-wide information systems transformation to
The US information technology industry finished last week with a
flurry of bad news as equipment makers cut forecasts and reports
A budget-busting economic downturn could propel corporate technology
chieftains higher up the totem pole, benefiting from fatter pay
