Product Management Systems in Financial Services Software Architectures

Abstract

Consolidating and modernizing software architectures in the financial services industry has become a number one issue on the current agenda of Chief Information Officers (CIOs). Common software architectures have matured over the past twenty years or more but the business itself has changed so seriously that many companies, especially insurance carriers, have architectures that lag behind the business innovation. Today, more and more CIOs agree that they have to spend major parts of their IT budget for maintenance and that the ratio between costs and innovation is not appropriate anymore (e. g. cf. (Lier 2005)). (Hersh 2006) confirms and predicts that reducing operational costs will stay a top priority for quite a while because maintenance costs can range from uncomfortably high to downright crushing when carriers spend 80 percent or more of their budgets on maintenance rather than new projects.