Agility the Key for Market Survival

If there was one takeaway from this year's European Trading Architecture Summit, it was that those banks who refused to move with the times will go the way of the dinosaurs. Regulatory pressures, new technology, a more assertive client base and, critically, new entrants into the banking market are all forcing a rethink of traditional business models.

This has, perhaps, been most evident on the retail side, but the extent to which modern banks are monitoring the flourishing fin-tech scene in places such as Canary Wharf shouldn't be underestimated. Most banks represented on the panels had some form of program or specialist division in place to analyze the impact of new technology, and indeed, the CIO of a major bank, whom I interviewed the day after ETAS, said the same thing.

Disruption, it seems, is the new norm.

So when people talk about agility, the gut reaction for which is to file it along with other meaningless conference buzzwords such as "innovation", they really do mean it. There are limits on how agile an investment bank can be, of course, in that they are not Silicon Valley start-ups, and they shouldn't be, either. However, changes in market structure are also forcing firms to reconsider, from the group up, how the business and how technology is operated.

The enabling power of cloud, both for the banks and the potential new competitors in the market, was cited frequently. Most tier-one sell-side firms have some sort of cloud program in place now, but the overall feeling was that while the technology was bedded in, it still has an uncertain future. Will regulation, for instance, make it difficult to fully harness the agility that cloud offers? Likewise, are there ways to more effectively fine-tune it, without the binary choice of go big or go home?

Other panels on the day covered the usual range of topics for architecture summits, but there was something of a change in the water this year. Regulation, of course, is still a huge topic, and it will run and run, but the tenor was somewhat more advanced this year, as if the industry was finally starting to adapt to the way things worked now, and could see a light at the end of the tunnel. Interesting stuff.