Business Solutions
Sign of the times
Guest blogger, Chris Pickles, head of industry initiatives, BT, says SWIFT has sent a clear message to application vendors this year at Sibos. There is less space on the exhibition floor for them as SWIFT sees vendors as not only partners, but competitors.
Perhaps the message of Sibos is changing. It’s always been about quality rather than quantity. Word is that this year there is less square-footage of exhibition space, larger banks have taken larger spaces, and that there’s less space left for vendors and fewer vendors have booths as a result. SWIFT made it clear at last year’s Sibos in Amsterdam that application vendors are firms that SWIFT will compete against and not just partner with. So, putting those two things together, maybe application vendors aren’t as important here as they used to be.
One law of IT is Butter’s Law – network demand doubles every nine months, making Moore’s Law look like snail’s-pace. SWIFT’s volumes double maybe every 10 years. Meanwhile, it is returning rebates each year to its users that look to be larger than its growth in message volume. That doesn’t sound like a long-term sustainable business model – if you want to stay in the network business.
Perhaps what we are seeing at Sibos this year is the first real step-change by SWIFT to its business model. The quality of attendees is definitely here, and the topic of discussion is business applications and not network connectivity. The growth of the SWIFT user community won’t come from large institutions with large message volumes – they are all already on-board. Growth will come from medium-to-small users with low to very low message volumes and using secured public internet connections – not a viable business unless you have value-add to sell to that community in terms of application solutions.
So when we all go to next year’s Sibos in Osaka, what roles do you think that application vendors and SWIFT service bureaux will play?
Date Posted:21st September 2011