Welcome to the Financial Services section of ISV News. Oracle works with a large number of ISVs in the financial services sector and is committed to increasing its traction in this market to generate greater opportunities for all our partners.

We believe that the banking industry has reached a critical point, where internal and external pressures are compelling financial organisations to replace their legacy and proprietary core banking systems. With these replacement projects generally costing approximately $100 million each, we believe that there will be many lucrative opportunities in the sector for our ISV partners.

Oracle recently purchased a majority stake in i-flex, a leading provider of banking and financial services software, and we believe this acquisition makes strategic sense both for us and our ISV partners in this sector. I-flex is a leading supplier of next generation core-banking software, the acquisition will help Oracle to gain a much greater footprint and play a stronger role in the financial services industry.

The technology and expertise we have gained from this acquisition has enabled us to develop Oracle Fusion for Banking & Insurance, bringing the benefits of the Oracle Fusion middleware directly to customers operating in banking, insurance and capital markets. We already see our ISV partners achieving greater success leveraged by the increased brand awareness of Oracle within the financial services sector.

An example of the kind of opportunities that are available is the raft of regulatory requirements placed on European financial service providers in particular. ISVs who can deliver Oracle based solutions for Basel II, MiFID, Sepa, Solvency II and so forth will certainly find a great deal of interest in their software.

Oracle's vision for next generation core banking technology is based on open standards such as Java and Service Oriented Architecture, enabled by Oracle Fusion for Banking & Insurance. We do not intend to be the sole supplier of core banking solutions but rather will provide solutions which are open and inclusive, giving our customers the flexibility to choose components from a wide range of ISVs.

While we want to get right into the heart of the banking and financial services industry, we by no means are able, or would want to, provide all the diverse modules of functionality that are required in this sector. This is something we feel are specialist ISV partners are far better positioned to deliver.

By delivering Oracle Fusion for Banking & Insurance we will provide a bigger market opportunity for our ISV partners to plug their own applications into. This will also enable us to deliver a clear product roadmap for compelling next generation core banking solutions.

What we want to do is build an accurate picture of what the architecture for a bank or an insurance company looks like, and to provide the core of that architecture in an open, standards based framework to give the customer the highest degree of choice and flexibility for plugging in third party applications.

This will help all of us to push into new markets and find new opportunities. I hope you are as excited about this as we are.

Harry Stehrenberger
VP Financial Services Industry, Oracle EMEA