Nine out of 10 financial services industry executives expect continued cost increases in their compliance departments over the next two years, according to a global survey by Accenture of 150 compliance officers at banking, insurance, and capital markets firms across 13 countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.1
To be compliant these firms must provide timely, accurate, and detailed data about the transactions they manage, says James DArezzo, CEO of Condusiv Technologies, the world leader in I/O reduction software. In many cases, the greatest share of the stress this places on the industrys IT departments come from applications running Microsoft SQL server, due to the burgeoning amounts of data being processed in an increasingly fragmented, digitized, and high-speed industry.
According to the Accenture survey, nearly half of the executives predicting the continuation of higher spending on compliance expect increases of 10% to 20%, and nearly one in five said they were expecting increases of more than 20%. Nearly a quarter of surveyed firms reported spending more than 5% of net income on compliance. Steve Culp, senior managing director and global head of Accentures Finance and Risk practice, commented, With the cost of maintaining compliance rising and new risks continuing to emerge, its imperative that firms find a path to more sustainable compliance costs. They should be thinking in terms of advanced technologies that can bring stable, cost-effective solutions that will enhance the functions performance.
DArezzo emphatically agrees, noting that the financial services sector is already an outlier in terms of IT cost. A survey by CIO showed financial services as devoting 10.5% of total revenue, by far the largest of any industry, followed by government (7.8%), healthcare (5.0%), wholesale and retail (3.9%) and manufacturing (3.4%). Not surprisingly for such a data-intensive field, financial services also reported proportionately the most heavily staffed IT departments, with an average of 15.7 users per IT staffer, followed by healthcare (25.4), government (37.8), manufacturing (40.9), and wholesale/retail (47.5)2
Given the realities of IT spending in this industry, says Condusivs DArezzo, we think the Accenture report has hit the nail on the head. We are the world leader in this area, and have seen users of our software solutions more than double the I/O capability of storage and servers, including SQL servers, in their current configurations. The only way financial services companies will be able to meet the compliance demands being placed on them, and at the same time meet their efficiency and profitability targets, will be to improve the performance of their existing capacity, particularly with regard to I/O reduction.
About Condusiv Technologies
Condusiv Technologies is the world leader in software-only storage performance solutions for virtual and physical server environments, enabling systems to process more data in less time for faster application performance. Condusiv guarantees to solve the toughest application performance challenges with faster-than-new performance via V-locity for virtual servers or Diskeeper for physical servers and PCs. With over 100 million licenses sold, Condusiv solutions are used by 90% of the Fortune 1000 and almost three-quarters of the Forbes Global 100 to increase business productivity and reduce data center costs while extending the life of existing hardware. Condusiv Chief Executive Officer Jim DArezzo has had a long and distinguished career in high technology.
Condusiv was founded in 1981 by Craig Jensen as Diskeeper Corporation. Jensen authored Diskeeper, which became the best-selling defragmentation software of all time. Over 37years, he has taken the thought leadership in file system management and caching and transformed it into enterprise software. For more information, visit www.condusiv.com.
- Compliance Costs for Financial Institutions Will Continue to Increase Over the Next Two Years, Accenture, April 10, 2017.
- Nash, Kim S., Information Technology Budgets: Which Industry Spends the Most?, CIO, November 2, 2007.
