Infosys Survey: Credit Crunch Here to Stay

Technology to mitigate the cost of increasing compliance for Australia’s financial services industry

Melbourne, Australia: September 30, 2008: The global credit crisis will last for over a year, according to an industry survey recently conducted by Infosys Australia at the Financial Services Institute of Australia (FINSIA) conference.

Infosys gathered the opinions of over 60 delegates – 66 per cent of who were academics – and found that 67 per cent believe the global credit crisis will continue well into next financial year, with another 31 per cent anticipating it would last between six to 12 months. Only two per cent expect global markets to improve in less than six months.

However, the majority (61 per cent) did not believe tightened lending practices were the answer for Australian banks, which are already more conservative than US banks. Two-thirds did agree that the costs of managing risk would likely require significant capital investments in both technology and business processes; and called for Australian financial institutions to consider knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and online hosted loan origination systems to mitigate the costs of greater compliance.

Infosys sponsored the FINSIA conference where over 100 professionals from the financial services industry and academics were present. The conference was held at the University of Melbourne on the 29th and 30th of September.