By Oonagh Leighton
Research and additional reporting from Katrina Haagensen, Kap Monet
and Da Ly Nguyen
Definitions: Software gets space-age | Profiles | Survey results | Trading Screen: Pulling IT all together
FINANCIAL SERVICES SOFTWARE is big business. In 2005, European banks' IT expenditure will total more than €45 billion, almost 17% of which will go on external software, according to IT research and consulting firm Celent Communications. IT costs in the US securities industry will reach $26 billion this year, of which external software accounts for a quarter. And the market is in an upward spending cycle [see charts].
For financial firms, technology acts as a powerful competitive lever for delineation and gain.
"Technology is a huge differentiator and the gap is getting wider not narrower," says Clifford Lewis, chairman of Currenex, an online FX trading platform. "This is an area where organizational issues become very important. You have to be...
