Oracle Technology Musings

With the markets plunging for the last couple of weeks, financial institutions have been suffering all over the world. Whether they had credit issues or not, the bad ones are taking the "not so" bad ones with them in their fall! After years of prosperity and the market consolidation through acquisitions, it's time for other stories.
IT has been trying to keep up with the ever changing demands. Until now, a lot of the demands were around integration. Integration of IT departments, IT systems, databases...
In the BeNeLux, Fortis bank has grown like that... out of banks in Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, Fortis had grown to a big player for the region. Recently, Fortis was split up in three different entities, and the Belgian entity has been bought by BNP Paribas.
So what about the IT? A lot of IT systems are present in Belgium (information from a blogger of the bank. source in dutch, source in french). And apparently, the Dutch entity cannot run its agencies nor home banking system independently from the Belgian systems. And as if things weren't difficult enough, the Belgian entity will have to be integrated in the French BNP Paribas entity which has been outsourced! I guess a lot of water will flow to the sea before this whole mishmash is sorted. I wouldn't dare to offer an immediate advice, not only out of sheer anxiety of taking the wrong decision, but also because this bank is a valued Oracle customer.
So if you face financial troubles in the near future, is your IT department agile enough to cope with diverging part of your business ànd/or merge with other businesses? Have you thought about it before reading this article? If so, are you scared. If not, are you scared yet?
Picture by Whimsical Chris