FOREX TECHNOLOGY


Te cloud’s capacity to enable banks and trading firms to deploy new technology without large upfront investment costs, with spending on infrastructure spread into flexible payments should make it an increasingly popular IT solution. Tis is likely to bolster innovation in the FX industry, as it will facilitate more opportunities for banks and trading firms to experiment with new projects.


Houstoun of Rapid Addition says participants in the Forex industry should decide exactly what computational problems they want to solve before taking the plunge and opting for a cloud-based solution. “Ten it is a case of aligning the model the cloud provider offers with what you are trying to do,” says Houstoun.


Ralf Behnstedt “Te role of a bank IT department can shift towards


‘managing the network’, where as before it was about ‘running the application”


infrastructure with anyone else. cloud services might be best located in a data center for a bank’s sole use.”


Hybrid clouds


Man of BT Radianz says there will be a rise in use of hybrid clouds in the financial services industry. “We know that our customers have moved to the public cloud for specific functions such as HR and CRM. Te caveat here is that while the applications may run in the cloud, the proprietary data may still physically sit on the firm’s premises and that seems to be an acceptable compromise,” he says.


Once the “prickly issues” of data security and regulatory compliance can be overcome in the financial services industry, Man of BT Radianz believes there will be an “exponential growth” in cloud technologies. “Key to this is that the regulators which are currently lagging on technology innovation can catch-up with what is coming out of Silicon Valley which measures history on what was happening six months ago,” he says.


108 | october 2011 e-FOREX


While Tolman of Cloud Trading Technologies argues that vested interests within banks and trading firms are resisting take up of cloud solutions, he expects these to subside as the benefits of the cloud become more apparent and firms which do not enjoy the potential cost savings offered by the cloud come under “existential threat”.


Paradigm shift in Financial IT


Behnstedt of FX Architects says the advent of the cloud is such a paradigm shift in financial technology that it could make the existing structure of IT departments “obsolete” if there is a failure to adapt. But he argues that if bank IT departments view the cloud as an opportunity – rather than a threat – a brighter future will be possible.


“Te role of a bank IT department can shift towards ‘managing the network’, where as before it was about ‘running the application’. Bank IT guys need to see the cloud as a challenge and not as a threat. Tis is a fundamental pre-requisite to being part of the change. Te change will happen anyway as business always looks for opportunities to decrease the cost base,” says Behnstedt.


In fact, Behnstedt expects cloud computing to be embraced to such an extent that in the next five years the term is likely to become implicit in the same way that “client-server” became implicit after the first major paradigm shift that started with the introduction of the PC some 30 years ago. “It could just become the natural way of hosting applications in future. I’m not saying it will. But it clearly has the potential to do so,” he says.


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