Anyone using outsourcing for credit processes must ensure best possible data protection for loan data. Banks and insurers must be able to rely on the fact that the business can be operated continuously without restrictions – even in risk situations. Increasingly stringent requirements are also being placed on sustainability. LOANCOS therefore works closely with the Bechtle Group who operate data centres in Germany with the highest security standards. Three questions for Marcus Zimmermann, Business Unit Development, Bechtle IT System House Frankfurt am Main:
Information security and risk management are permanent tasks in the context of outsourcing IT services. How prepared are you as a service provider for the new banking supervisory requirements for IT (BAIT)?
Marcus Zimmermann: The Bechtle IT system house Frankfurt offers a governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) service for customers in the finance and insurance industry. We pursue a holistic, tool-supported approach that provides the necessary information and documentation at a central location and makes the essential reports available on request. At the heart of this tool-supported approach is a reference model developed between the QIRM Institute and Bechtle over the past 18 months, which already has a comprehensive collection of documentation templates that are very closely aligned with practical requirements.
The question of what sustainable IT operations can look like is also becoming an even greater focus of consideration in the financial industry. How do you support ESG ratings today and in the future?
Marcus Zimmermann: We focus on great transparency in our sustainability activities. To this end, we have been actively positioning ourselves for years in the following five ESG ratings: EcoVadis, CDP, MSCI, ISS, and Sustainalytics. In this way, we show our employees, customers, and investors that sustainability is a strategic issue for the Bechtle Group.
In the last two years, some technology projects in the Covid19 environment have been postponed in favour of other priorities. What technology trends do you see in the banking and insurance industry over the next two years? And what recommendations can you give to banks and insurance companies?
Marcus Zimmermann: With our Bechtle IT system house in Frankfurt, we are focusing our digital transformation projects on the medium-term changeover from traditional workplace services to the use of M365 cloud services from Microsoft. A key driver for these projects is better support for IT users in their daily work in terms of agile collaboration – both within the company and with business partners. The main challenges here are securitisation and special attention to the management of upcoming changes for IT users, i.e., so-called user-adoption. This means that customers and their approvals are the main priority, and are planned and implemented as a dedicated sub-project. We recommend our consulting and professional services, as well as managed services in the context of the Microsoft Cloud to our banking and insurance customers in the sense of a reliable and sustainable partnership at eye level.
