Towards an Integrated Architecture and Assessment Model for Financial Sourcing

Although many banks still report strong profits, important competitive, technological and regulatory changes force these companies to reconsider their strategies and structures. Among the current developments are initiatives to increase flexibility by reducing fixed costs and to leverage activities with competitors and other partners. Contrary to manufacturing industries, financial companies have maintained a high degree of vertical integration and sourcing models are slowly emerging which focus not only on the technological infrastructure and application provisioning but also on business functions. However, offerings for alternative sourcing models are only emerging in the marketplace and insights on generic sourcing models as well as their economic viability is still lacking. To address these challenges a two-year multilateral research project has been started which is presented in this research in progress paper. After an outline of the motivation and the research design, initial results are described in the area of payment execution.