IT adoption was like a blessing in disguise for the financial sector. If we analyze the last decade, we can clearly see that the tremendous growth of the financial sector would not have become possible without the active usage of information technology.

A decade back, the entire financial industry was so opaque, time consuming, rigid and inconvenient that it was very difficult to get the required market and financial information about any stock. Accessing banks was a major issue as working hours of banks were in conflict with the financial sector. But today, with the help of IT adoption by the BFSI segment, the entire system has become transparent and all the required information is available easily to all the participants: be it the client, the intermediary, or even the controlling body.

With the help of Internet banking and e-broking services, IT has become all pervasive. IT has also helped us in handling higher volumes with better transparency and better quality of services. While a few years back the volume handled by each exchange was small, today we see that each prominent broking house handles more than 2-4 times of that volume.

Ketan Shah associate director, IT, Angel Broking

The financial sector without IT is history, and the sector cannot move a step further without IT. The sector relies highly on IT, and IT is considered to be the backbone of the business. This throws exceptional challenges for the IT folks in the financial sector. Security is a key issue in the financial sector because of its nature of business and the direct involvement of finance. It is also equally important to be quite flexible to the business so that the business objective is also achieved.

Striking the right balance between security and flexibility is the key challenge. To hit the right balance between this, one needs to create awareness about the usage of IT among users, who may or may not be IT savvies.

When IT is accessed on the move, it raises the security alert since the data may get leaked. However, it is not advisable for companies to deny accessibility to those on the move, but organizations also have to ensure security. Creating the right IT policy and awareness about the usage of mobile devices and handling credentials is essential.

The second challenge is the scalability of organization IT. The way business is growing in the financial sector, it is important to build scalable IT infrastructure. Normally, the time gap between identifying the need to upgrade any system and the time when one actually upgrades that system is very high due to reasons like approval of budget from the management, doing technical feasibility, procuring the material and then implementing and fine-tuning. It has been observed that during this intermediate time the business grows faster than the buffer kept.

As good IT governance, I would suggest two key participants should be fully involved in the projects, one is the CIO/CXO, and the other is the vendor. From the management perspective, it is important to have the involvement of CIO/CXO so that they are aware of how a particular IT adoption is going to benefit the business. Vendors are equally important as they need to support the environment post implementation, and it is very important that we explain to them our requirements very clearly. One of our innovative steps was to adopt a decentralized IT architecture, which was totally against the trend. When everybody was talking about consolidation, we thought out of the box for our customers and designed a decentralized architecture. This has not only enabled us to achieve greater reach but has also provided commercial benefits to our customers.

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