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BABU: Banks want a 24/7 support structure from vendors because internet and phone banking is on all the time.

UVK Kumar, head of IT at Doha Bank in Qatar, believes that information security has evolved differently in financial sectors, as it was required to be bullet-proof right from the very beginning.

“Financial information has always been sensitive, so when there was no internet banking there was still information security and it had been a primary principle of the financial industry. As technology grew up it became used more in financial transactions,” he says.

“Add to that the security aspects that also came into the picture. Compared to any other industry, information security has been cultural in the financial industry. That culture had to be retained and sustained or strengthened – even with the new technology coming in – so compared to other industries the financial industry is sensitive on information security,” adds Kumar.

In addition to security and having to account for 24/7 availability, Kumar explains that compliance is a major issue for the financial sector that might not be such a big factor for other industries.

According to Kumar, banks and financial institutions in the region are not yet using their systems effectively for compliance purposes, mainly because they are more focused on developing and supporting banking requirements.

When it comes to IT requirements, the phrase that “this is particularly true in the banking and finance sector” is done to death at conferences, exhibitions, user groups and more recently in online collaborative discussion. Vendors are usually the biggest proponents of the sentence – they are also responsible for coining it – particularly when discussing an area that may see them make some coin.

According to Kumar, the difference used to be very noticeable, but the gap has reduced because sectors like retail are now capturing a much larger chunk of customer information than they ever were before.

The heat of the flame

Feeling the brunt of the financial sector’s intensity are the IT vendors who operate in this space. While it may have become old-hat for the many organisations who supply the finance sector, the high expectations of CIOs still have to be met. Kalpesh Desai, CEO of Agile Financial Technologies, believes that banking and finance end users in the Middle East have higher expectations from vendors than other sectors do.

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