Software AG: Financial services leaders pull together to reverse the economic downturn in the UAE

While the dust is still settling on the turmoil in the industry, financial institutions have the opportunity to prepare for changes in Government regulation and market structure.

As highlighted at the G20 meeting in Washington on November 15th, the primacy of national regulation will place diverse demands on one of the most globalized parts of the world economy.

Financial institutions with a flexible and adaptable IT infrastructure will find it easier to implement and comply with differing new regulation at a time of economic recession.

A survey of the banking and insurance sectors last October backs this up with a majority of enterprises seeing IT as strategic to their future success primarily based on ÍT flexibility, transparency and automated business processes.

The Financial Services sector is in the midst of unprecedented transformation. Several factors are driving fundamental change: liberalization and increased competition, strategic mergers and acquisitions, regulatory pressure, systems reliability, convergence, and most obviously dealing with the current crisis. All of this requires large investment and a unity amongst the sector. If this is achieved new innovation could pave the way for cheaper finance and more jobs within the industry.

These issues will be addressed at the Financial Services Technology Summit in March at the Le Meridien Al Aqah Beach Resort, Fujairah - United Arab Emirates. Attendees will include the Heads of Technology and Business Development alongside their respected CEO community. Government officials have also confirmed attendance to ensure that the program will drive immediate value back to their constituencies as well as thought leaders from FSTC association and Financial Insights.

"We see three major challenges facing the Financial Services industry. Multiple national regulatory changes that will need to be implemented as easily and cost-effectively as possible, continued market consolidation that demands the fast integration of IT assets and improved risk management within a more restricted banking community."

said Software AG CEO, Karl-Heinz Streibich.

Further market uncertainty is compelling financial institutions to acquire or merge with others. The effort to integrate and consolidate monolithic or packaged applications with each other is enormous. There are major cost savings and new business opportunities available to financial institutions with an agile IT infrastructure, "these Enterprises will find M&A activities much easier and the benefits will be accrued much sooner", said Streibich.

Software AG completed a survey of banking and insurance companies in October, 2008 and the results show that IT is seen as a strategic resource by a majority of enterprises and increasingly at an Executive Board level. IT transparency, flexibility and modernization are seen as important goals and over 60% are implementing business process management projects as a result. The alternative course to providing that flexibility is unacceptable - replacing existing systems, and thereby the embedded intellectual capital - had just a 7% response rate.

"The new generation of business management software (BPM) optimizes the business decision process and gives institutions the real-time view of business activities across business units", according to Marco Gerazounis, Software AG Senior Vice-president for the Middle East. "As a result, merged companies can cherry-pick the best systems and applications to use going forward, thus providing a more flexible and adaptable post-merger IT infrastructure."

Software AG is the world's largest independent provider of Business Infrastructure Software. Our 4,000 global enterprise customers achieve business results faster by modernizing, integrating and automating their IT systems and processes. As a result, they rapidly build measurable business value and meet changing business demands. Based on our solutions, organizations are able to liberate and govern their data, systems, applications, processes and services - achieving new levels of business flexibility.

Our leading product portfolio includes solutions for high performance data management, developing and modernizing applications, enabling service-oriented architecture, and improving business processes. By combining our technology with industry expertise and best practices experience, our customers improve and differentiate their businesses - faster.