Financial Services and Insurance
An Industry Under Pressure
Banks, investment firms and other financial services organizations are under pressure to reduce costs and show immediate improvement, and their leadership is increasingly turning to IT to find innovative ways to achieve these goals. The good news is: instead of retrenching and retreating in response to current economic pressures, we see forward-looking financial services firms leveraging RFID-based applications to drive down costs, eliminate waste and improve customer service and satisfaction. These applications deliver accelerated time-to-value, providing immediate help to banks and other companies striving to weather the current business cycle, while positioning them to gain efficiencies, growth and market share in the coming recovery.
Innovation As A Recovery Strategy
A number of financial services firms, including members of the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC), have discovered they can leverage RFID as a proven way to reduce cost and inefficiency, and to improve customer service while meeting crucial regulatory and compliance mandates. Banks, insurance companies and other firms have deployed RFID to:
- Manage and better utilize key physical IT data center assets
- Provide autonomous process compliance and inventory management for hard disk drives, data tapes and other media
- Prevent the theft and loss of portable IT assets such as laptops, data tapes and other resources
- Increase the velocity and accuracy of singleuse cash bags as they move through the cash management and vault processes
- Manage physical documents and records more easily and efficiently
RFID technologies provide a standards-based, datacentric solution that financial services organizations can use to measurably improve productivity and service capabilities, while reducing the total cost of IT ownership. Having experienced the earlier industrychanging impacts of ATM and on-line banking technologies, the financial services industry has been quick to recognize the promise of RFID.