Light at the end of the tunnel?

We are gathering Celent analysts from across the globe for our annual global off site at Celent. ideas around top trends in both Retail and Corporate Banking seem to take on a new tenor this year. No longer are cost reduction and risk the top priorities. Many other growth-oriented initiatives have percolated up to the top of the lists. Multichannel still remains on the top three list from mobile banking to mobile payments across the globe to mobile Remote Deposit Capture in the US. Payments are now moving to the fore. Whether it be mobile payments, P2P, or prepaid, banks across the globe are looking closely at these as a way to ensure customer loyalty or perhaps even generate profit. Banks are facing increasing complexity, whether it be across channels or lines of business. Between channel proliferation, customer profitability, and risk, many are finding that they need to take an enterprise view of architecture and have enterprise needs take a more important place in IT. Whether the discussion is around Payment Service Hubs (PSH), Enterprise Service Buses (ESB), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), or Enterprise Data Warehouses (EDW), bankers are thinking about their business more holistically. These three themes seem to cover the majority of our top trends this year, which is a refreshing change from recent years. These initiatives are about growing the business, offering customers more choice or better choices rather than reducing losses, collecting debts, and cutting cost. I look forward to this new, more proactive attitude around banking in 2011.