Getting off the beaten track.
Dear Readers,
2008 will go down in history as the year of the financial crisis. Yet our fiscal 2008had far more positive hallmarks, being a year of many positive developments andfresh impetus for our organisation. The current situation is compelling organisationseverywhere, but particularly banks and financial service providers, to take a long, hard look at their business processes and models, and re-appraise demand and efficiency. Our customers are revisiting the idea of outsourcing, investigating how it can power efforts to become more efficient and still combine flexibility with top quality requirements. The current scenario therefore affords us enormous opportunities. It also brings enormous challenges – because our customers expect uncompromising support from their partner in their drive toward sustained IT cost reduction. This puts us in the challenging position of having to stay competitive in a highly price driven market.
What’s our approach? Rigorous cost management and a clear service focus which we have tailored around the needs of the financial sector with scalable, cost-optimised infrastructure services. We also help customers stay ahead on this fast-paced market: our application services enable banks and financial service providers to get new financial products and processes to market within just months.
2008 was also another very special milestone: the merger of our parent company Sparkassen Informatik with FinanzIT to form Finanz Informatik. This was an excellent opportunity for us also to make a major change. On January 1, 2009, the IZB Informatik-Zentrum took a new name: Finanz Informatik Technologie Service. With “Finanz” and “Informatik” (Informatics in English), the new name makes clear the affiliation to our parent group; “Technologie” and “Service” stand for our IT and service competence.
The fresh stimulus from the Finanz Informatik merger has been hugely valuable in underpinning our own business realignment. Our goal is to focus more than ever on the financial service provider market in Germany and to position ourselves as the IT partner for solutions that our customers can rely on to take their business into the future. We’re basing the business on competitive IT infrastructure services with top quality and security standards, and also on innovative application services.
- Anton Müller Dr. Walter Kirchmann
With the migration of the Bavarian Sparkasse banks now complete, we have recently signed off on one of the major projects of recent years. This is another milestone along the road to becoming a market-driven organisation, since the “captive” portion of our revenues is now down to 30% of the total.
We work with best-in-class partners in the finance industry to serve our existing markets and develop new ones. Just a few months into our new partnership with Oracle Financial Services Software (OFSS), we helped Halifax Bank of Scotland enter the German market with a direct-banking service offering based on our IT application services.
We would like to thank our customers and partners for their confidence in us, and for the quality and depth of these working relationships. We also thank our corporation and technology partners. Being successful in a turbulent market environment comes down to excellent service. So let us close by thanking our employees for making this success possible. The commitment which the people at FI-TS bring to their work, their creativity and understanding, make us one of Germany’s top IT service providers to the financial sector. We’re looking forward to continuing this successful path with you in 2009.
Dr. Walter Kirchmann
Anton Müller