Double Dip Fears lead

With anaemic growth and talks of a possible double dip recession the illustrious FST 20 (which consists of the 20 leading figure heads in North American Finance) were called to congress in California this week to discuss how the Financial Community can unify to avoid a repeat of 2008.

The FST 20 meeting was held at Half Moon Bay and was chaired by Laurie Smith, CTO of Morgan Stanley. Notable attendees included Charles Abonnel, MD of BNP Paribas, Mats Anderson CTO of NASDAQ and Bill Chenevish, Vice Chairman Ops for US BANCORP.

“In a previous FST 20 session earlier this year, we explored the key themes impacting financial services including risk management, innovation, relationship management, and restoring trust and confidence. At that time, the backdrop was an economic recovery which was just on the horizon. While there have been a few positive signs since that time, the horizon now is in fact anything but clear,” said a spokesman for the FST Committee.

Government officials have seen a series of macroeconomic errors and believe that growth is more fragile than predicted by data specialists. It has also been reported by the committee that productivity and government debt is healthy and although the pace of recovery has slowed it has by no means stopped.

In order to adapt and compete, the financial industry needs to continue to embrace strategies around streamlining processes, cost cutting, and improving customer service. IT is a central component to all these strategies and its role has become more important than ever to ensure success.

One topic concerned traditional RDBMS technologies that have failed to solve the challenges presented by the growing volumes of complex financial instruments since the crash discussions concerned the new class of applications for derivatives, threat analysis, and compliance.

“Traditional relational database technology has solved many of the problems of the past few decades. But a new class of problems has arrived – problems requiring new technology for 21st-century issues.” David Kellogg – CEO, MarkLogic

Such a cohesive response from the industry will no doubt help to stable the ship; they clearly fear the embarrassment of further bailouts.