In July 2021, Banking Circle spoke to 600 CTOs and CIOs at Banks, FinTechs and PSPs across the UK, DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) and Benelux (Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg) regions. The research provided insights into the challenges currently faced by CTOs and CIOs across Europe.

The results, published in the white paper, “Futureproofing Payments Tech: The challenges facing CIOs and CTOs”, show a generally positive outlook. Most plan to increase budgets in the next 12 months and intend to utilise a combination of building, buying and outsourcing to update their payment tech solutions.

In all areas of responsibility, the research showed that there are more CTOs and CIOs who are ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ confident, than ‘not at all’ or ‘not very’ confident. It also showed that PSPs and FinTechs were more confident than their Bank counterparts that their organisations are fit for purpose for the future.

100% of FinTechs and 99% of Banks have skills gaps in their organisations

One area of concern is the skills required to keep the business up to date and innovative going forward. All of the FinTech respondents said that they have skills gaps in their organisation, and most expect to see their Payments IT team or resource increase in the next 12 months.

To ‘build’ or ‘buy’?

When it comes to building new solutions, two thirds of all respondents are planning to ‘build’ payments tech in-house, and the same number plan to ‘buy’ off the shelf. Only slightly fewer (65%) expect to outsource or utilise partnerships. These results also show that organisations intend to utilise a combination of providers, bringing together external and internal resources to meet the current and future requirements of the business and its customers.

Tech outages, staying up to date with market developments, and employee skills are the key issues keeping FinTech CTOs and CIOs up at night

The research also founds that tech budgets are increasing, but not by enough for decision makers to sanction a complete overhaul of their tech or payments infrastructure. Around two in three have determined that they will need to partner with external providers. Such collaboration will be an important tool in futureproofing both Banks and FinTechs.

Banking Circle White Paper is available HERE