Finance Monthly January 2020 Edition

18 www.finance-monthly.com FINANCE & BUSINESS - POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS Swiping right on an IT partner With a vast range of technological partners out there, the first step for banks is knowing how to select the business best equipped to help them build resilient and effective IT systems. But it’s not just about experience. Crucially, an effective IT partner will adopt a certain approach to contingency planning. It will not only think about today, restricted to existing infrastructure, ways of working, services and threats. Instead, it will focus on tomorrow, asking how will innovation impact on systems; what new threats lie over the horizon; how will increasing automation impact on networks? Selecting an IT partner with foresight, infrastructure and technical knowledge to challenge a bank to think about the future, is critical. It is the only way to ensure systems can deal with the now while proving adaptable as their business, and customer expectations, evolve. Is there anything more frustrating than finding out your bank account is unavailable due to a technical issue? Or being an IT manager at a bank and, through no fault of your own, feeling powerless when your IT system goes down? IT failures at major banks are high on the news agenda right now. A recent Treasury Committee report found that the frequency of crashes and associated customer disruption was “unacceptable”, leaving customers cashless and cut off. Recent outages have happened as a result of various factors, such as upgrades going wrong and – in some unfortunate cases – crippling cyber-attacks. Given the costs of disruption to both customers and to banks, outages are simply not an option. To cope, banks must ensure their systems, processes, and underlying infrastructure are resilient – but doing so requires significant investment. How then, do they select the right partners who will help them not only survive, but thrive, in the long term? DELIVERING SUCCESSFUL IT SYSTEMS THROUGH THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS Rob Orr, Executive Director Virgin Media Business www.virginmediabusiness.co.uk