Message from Our CEO

That we apply innovative thinking to a range of challenges - from the familiar and established to the recent and still-emerging.

In our industry, major sources of potential disruption remain - not least sovereign debt default and bank stress resilience. In the context of a protracted recovery from the 2008 crisis, financial institutions must live with the ‘new normal’: a re-focus on profitable execution of mainstream banking, in a climate of profound and ongoing change.

Four major issues define the financial services landscape: regulation; consolidation; globalization; and innovation.

Regulation – the way business is done will continue to change. Consolidation – firms will rationalize; fighting harder to keep what they need, lose what they don’t need, and gain what they want. Globalization – fit, hungry businesses will move to aggressively enter new markets. Innovation – ‘more of same’ will not win customers or secure structural and operational efficiencies.

In this landscape, winning financial institutions will embrace transformation with more commitment than ever. They will maintain stronger links between technology capability and the needs of business, while managing the inevitable complexity that arises from evolving and expanding IT needs. Their CIOs will accurately explain and control cost and accommodate the need for commercial flexibility. They will offer the business predictable levels of quality, while satisfying a wide range of front-to-back and regulatory demands. They will achieve all this in a constant climate of ‘do more for less’.

The successful will adopt an architectural design for transformation to turn aspirations into actual state. They will achieve the necessary operational excellence to attract and retain customers cost-effectively, to enable change and growth in the face of extreme competition and to drive cost down. They will manage IT complexity. They will understand, predict and control risk. And they will produce a practical response to regulation – by interpreting it as a source of business advantage, while tightly managing compliance cost.

How do we see the future? Successful firms will go on learning to thrive in a new risk climate, adjusting to ‘government risk aversion’ – with its tighter definitions of risk and increasing reserve capital demands. They will do ‘risky business’ in risk-minimized ways – as they learn to work with proliferating regulation. They will re-focus on familiar core activities. But, going forward, they will be driven by new and innovative thinking around such established challenges as building revenue from mainstream lending, underwriting and advisory services.

For strategic change and operational improvement, success will lie with vision and delivery equally. To help advance the industry’s vision, we support active dialog between practitioners, researchers, academics and commentators, through the Capco Institute. Our World Economic Forum involvement – as Financial Services and Technology members - underscores our global outlook. And now, as a member of the FIS family, we are able to draw on the delivery strengths of more than thirty thousand staff worldwide.

In this new landscape, how does Capco help? We offer market-leading breadth of global delivery capability, combined with depth of focused industry expertise, insight and innovation capability. We apply a unique understanding of the technology complexity that goes alongside strategic change and the growing operational flexibility it demands.

The ‘new normal’ will apply for some time to come. Capco will support clients fully in their endeavors to survive, adapt and thrive. We will continue to combine deep industry understanding with practical technology experience, to help equip financial services institutions prepare for a successful future. With an enhanced worldwide presence, Capco delivers. From strategy and design to detailed daily implementation, we will continue to serve our clients and thereby play a full and productive role in forming the future of finance.

Rob Heyvaert
Capco Founder, Chairman & CEO
Corporate Executive Vice President and member of the Executive Management Team of FIS