Kristin Moyer

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Kristin R. Moyer
Research Director
11 years at Gartner
18 years IT industry

Kristin Moyer is a research director in Industry Advisory Services/Banking and Investment Services. She has more than 17 years of experience across the global high-technology industry in a variety of roles. Ms. Moyer's research coverage includes card… Read Full Bio

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“Excuse Me, Can You Please Buy that Vendor?”

by Kristin Moyer  |  November 14, 2008  |  1 Comment

Kristin Moyer and Peter Redshaw here.  This past week, one of the large, global technology vendors echoed what Gartner is hearing from our client base – that banks are becoming increasingly concerned about the financial viability of some of their niche, but critical, technology vendors.  In fact, in some cases banks are going so far as to request that their large technology vendors acquire smaller, but important technology vendors so that their service remains uninterrupted.

This is unlikely to happen on any kind of broad scale.  But the point here is that banks are beginning to make new requests of their technology vendors.  Here are three vendor strategies CIOs can use to increase the likelihood of project funding:

  • Risk sharing – banks can ask vendors to take a risk sharing approach to new projects.  This may involve everything from providing financial incentives for projects to be delivered under budget (and splitting the difference) to sharing in the cost savings achieved.
  • Financing – banks can ask vendors to subsidize the cost of new investments through the vendor’s financing business.
  • Self-funding – banks can focus on projects and technology implementations that are self-funding (however, projects such as IT modernization that may not be self-funding are still critical to agility, transparency and efficiency).

 CIOs should explore the impact these approaches can have on getting approval for strategic projects.  Combining all three of these strategies may help push through projects that otherwise would not be approved.

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  • 1 Mary Knox   November 14, 2008 at 5:14 pm

    This creates an interesting dilemma. While FS firms are concerned about the viability — and rightly so I believe — of smaller vendors, the “cure” being proposed means that FS firms become more closely tied to a smaller set of larger vendors. This also has been a concern of FS firms, that look to smaller vendor alternatives to increase negotiating leverage with the larger vendors, and also to ensure applications and development roadmaps/priorities that are vendor/source/application neutral. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.