Financial IT Not Flexible Enough for Regulatory Changes, Say Panelists

This response confirmed for him the belief that, although CTOs had been talking for years about building flexible IT that could roll with regulatory changes, they had yet to actually enact it.

"Some of our customers are getting crushed by this regulatory weight, from a technology perspective, and they're just not innovating," said Mark Palmer, VP and general manager at Tibco Streambase. "You come to these panels where people talk about big data but they just mean they're dealing with a lot of data. It's not what the rest of the world means by big data."

Other industries, he said, are busy innovating around Hadoop and open source technologies. Not so in financial services. There are some in financial IT who accuse Hadoop of being a solution without a problem - a characterization he considers behind the times. It's not a debate happening elsewhere.

Software AG's Ben Ernest-Jones agreed that flexibility is made easier with cutting edge technologies, and finance doesn't have enough. "Banks especially are very comfortable with technology that is proven to work over time," said the head of capital markets product strategy. "It's just the last few years where algo trading has caused some serious problems in the market that they're forced to look at these new technologies. But they're still going to be moving very slowly because they don't want to choose the wrong one. There's an attitude shift that has to happen as much as a technology one."

Whether that attitude shift happens or not, technology only becomes flexible, especially around regulation, when the data that underpins it is reliable, and reliably utilized, according to JPMorgan investment bank CTO Laura Hamilton. Data architecture and an understanding of your data lifecycle end to end are necessary. The next couple of years will be spent repairing the "fundamental flaws" in data procedures.