As the UK’s banking sector is reformed to meet the challenges posed by the recent banking crisis and provide the backdrop to economic recovery, the development of policy must reflect an understanding of how technology continues to be the driver of change in the financial services industry. Intellect believes that technology has a fundamental role in ensuring that such reform delivers stability, transparency and fairness for consumers, without unnecessarily harming the competitiveness of the industry itself. Therefore Intellect’s programme of activity in its Banking work stream is focused upon contributing to the development of policy, representing the collective expertise of its members, and highlighting the technology issues of critical importance to industry and policy-makers alike. Amongst other things, Intellect will look to engage policy makers and set out that technology has a role to play in:

• Reducing systemic risk – through facilitating greater and more accurate flows of information between institutions and with regulators so that build up of systemic risk can be identified at an early stage

• Increase flows of capital to SMEs – by improving the collation and sharing of credit risk information on SMEs between banks, more informed decisions can be made on lending to a sector that banks have largely treated as a commercial risk. Technology has a critical role in facilitating this sharing of data and as such, has a critical role to play in facilitating the UK’s economic recovery

• Increasing competition within the banking sector – by reducing customer inertia through the development and provision of individual, transferable bank account numbers; the provision of customer-focused technology-enabled products; and reducing start-up costs for new entrants

• Developing a more cost efficient and globally competitive banking system – by allowing banks to analyse, identify and remove poorly performing banking products and exit unprofitable markets; by helping financial services providers to build up a Single Customer View; by providing an alternative to continuous additions to complex legacy systems; and by identifying how technology can reduce the duplication of compliance cost and effort

Intellect is working with policy makers and regulators to ensure that the development of policy in this sphere is informed by the possibilities and parameters that technology offers to the banking sector.

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