Track Chair: Otto Lucius, Austrian Society for Bank Research

As financial services institutions face ever tougher competition and as the global delivery of financial services comes closer to reality, one of the key factors to success for financial services institutions (FSI) will be information systems. FSI will have to cope with several challenges, one of which will definitely be enterprise applications integration. FSI have a wide variety of historically grown, heterogeneous IT system architectures. In order to best perform, for example via straight through processing, FSI have to generate their customer data from a joint data base.

Another challenge for financial services institutions is sourcing. Any form of sourcing has grave impacts on the organisational processes. This track will discuss not only enterprise application integration, but also sourcing in every possible way. This also touches the make-or-buy decision dilemma, the solution of which is a prerequisite for structural changes in the financial services sector.

Papers addressing any aspect of information systems in financial services institutions will be welcome.

Suggested topics:

-	IS strategies: build vs. buy vs. outsource
-	Strategic considerations for insourcing
-	Future prospects of sourcing regarding e. g. payment transactions, securities settlement or loan business
-	The role of application service providers
-	Risks related to outsourcing
-	Wireless financial services applications
-	Wireless strategies and their integration into existing strategies
-	New forms of co-operation between financial services institutions and Telcos
-	Straight though processing
-	Possible solutions to enterprise applications integration
-	Data warehousing, Data mining and web mining with financial services institutions
-	Conducting business performance management with financial services institutions
-	The "life cycle" of IS decisions and IT budgets
-	IT spending estimates and outsourcing