CIO Forum: Vendors just don’t understand us, say financial CIOs

Vendors aren’t getting a lot of love from financial services’ heads of IT, if the CIOs at silicon.com CIO Forum are anything to go by – but it’s not necessarily their fault.

According to the CIOs, vendors looking to get the attention of financial services techies may struggle due to the complex nature of the businesses involved.

Chris Rawson, CIO, of Lloyds of London, which is made of over 60 separate organisations, said that for his company: “OEM vendors have great difficulty in cleaning up in the market” because they don’t have the same breadth of knowledge as IT staff who work internally.

However, there’s a particular breed of vendor that attracted few compliments in the world of finance IT – tech chameleons.

For those vendors trying to broaden their product lines and diversify into new areas, the financial IT market may prove tough to crack unless hardware and software sellers improve their track record for resilience.

Companies with a “standard offering…that move up the food chain… time and time again they disappoint us,” said Mark Russell, CIO at Lehmann Brothers.

Graham Yellowley, director of technology at Mitsubishi Securities International, added: “At the first hurdle they come across, often, they fall over.”

IT for financial services puts a high priority on resilience, it seems, but unlike some other industries, when it comes to breaking new ground, vendors get the thumbs down on innovation – along with the rest of the industry.

Yellowley said of his technological environment: “Innovation in IT is not a prominent as it used to be.” Rawson agreed: “We’re not good at innovation in IT in Lloyds market.”

Though the industry isn’t so keen on driving innovation from within, vendors aren’t leading from the front either.

Russell said: “There’s precious little [innovation] with vendors” but added that Lehmann Bothers clients are pushing for the company to innovate themselves: “Our client base is telling us they don’t want third party components… they want us to have some skin in the game. In some ways, it’s insane, we’re not built to be a network service company” but clients like to know the company is involved, he said.