Software Companies and Banks
Over the years I’ve dealt with a lot of software product companies. Most of them don’t really understand banks, and don’t get what banks do from the perspective of their daily business. Software companies also find it hard to understand the reasoning behind security and infrastructure hurdles that have been placed within the banks. Because of these two issues, lots of software companies fail to get their products into banks. The downside of this is obvious to those of us who work in banks – the software company is going to loose out on a lost of product revenue. This is coupled with the fact that banks historical have mountains of data to processs; banks are often ideal tuning grounds to help software companies build better products.
One of the problems of not understanding or not listening to the banks requirements is that the product company tries to sell a solution that is just inappropriate. Closed Door.
In the current market (credit crunch) product companies need to understand that if there product is to be accepted into a bank they need to effectively bend over backwards to assist the bank. They also need to accept the fact that for the first deal into a new banking client they need to accept a high percentage drop off the list prices. Pushing for a full list prices will unfortunately mean the door being well and truly closed in your face for possibly mean years.
Another important point is that if a product company want to get into a new client they need to answer emails, phone calls and questions in a timely manner and be open and responsive with technical information. Without this responsiveness banks will go elsewhere and use other products to solve their business solutions.
Net out, product companies need to understand that to make money they need to spend money – much like most things in life.
I guess it all depends of the type of solution you are trying to sell and the country you are working on.
At my company we’ve had more problems trying to implement our solutions on factories than on banks.
I do totaly agree with martin. Especially in banking industry, a lot of software providers are looking so closely to current quarter revenues that they simply forget about product management and delivering innovation. Well innovating and listening to client is essential, as long as you can understand your client…Remember me some periods at lds…Good old time..
trick with selling into banks is building something that you can resell to another with little or no change to the application – the holy grail of software licence. Fact is this is hard so you try to expose as much of the variability through configuration and doing this IN THE RIGHT WAY will either make or break your proposition.