Cash management beats budget constraints

Bank spending on cash management technology is set to grow by 7.1% in 2010, escaping IT budget restraints elsewhere in the industry, according to research from Boston-based analyst house Celent, says Finextra.

Although the online cash management technology market has reached maturity, it continues to be ripe for innovation and advancement, replacements, and new features, according to a new report from Celent.

"Cash management is taking centre stage this year in the wholesale banking space. It is receiving increased attention as banks look to upgrade or augment their aging platforms to woo business," says Jacob Jegher, senior analyst with Celent's Banking group and author of the report.

For a variety of reasons-technical, demographic, economic-there is now a great deal of interest in, and growing usage of, mobile devices for banking. Most of that use is still informational, like balance checking, writes ABA Banking Online.

And, as often happens when something reaches the “tipping point,” that wonderfully descriptive term made famous by Malcolm Gladwell, the change in momentum comes quickly.

“This is not a product you should wait six to nine months to get into,” insists Jeff Lewis of Metavante. “You have to offer some form of mobile service as a baseline.” Lewis, president of Metavante's ePayment Solution Division, says banks that do not offer mobile service have told him that customers in exit interviews have said they were leaving the bank to get it.

Well-planned deployment of blade servers is a key strategy for improving the energy efficiency of data centres according to the chief technology officer of financial services giant Deutsche Bank, reports eWeek Europe UK.

Speaking at the Green IT '09 conference in London last week, Stuart Hasking, chief technology officer, architecture and engineering, for Deutsche Bank, said that providing they are deployed in the right way, blade servers can significantly improve the efficiency of data centres.

“I am a big fan of blades which are very much the best way to get the most out of the energy coming into the data centre,” he said.