Rebound in Ops Spending to Focus on Clients

From the article "Rebound in Ops Spending to Focus on Clients" appearing on fundfire.com in January 2010. 

As corporate budgets thaw in 2010, asset managers are likely to begin work on a slate of technology projects that were put on hold over the past year. Strategic consultants predict operations spending will grow, albeit conservatively, and they say priorities for the year ahead will center on core business drivers, such as client service, portfolio management and risk management.

“It’s certainly not as if people have blank checks going into 2010,” says Roger White, a managing director at Citisoft. “But I think there’s recognition that there are strategic initiatives that require spending.”
Some firms will even begin addressing issues that have plagued them for much of the past decade. “Firms have, over the course of the last several years, expanded their product offerings, expanded the asset classes that they’re trading, and expanded regionally and globally in some cases,” says White. “As spending has been pulled back, firms lived with manual workarounds and other sub-optimal procedures and technological support because that’s what they had to do.”

The full article can be found at (subscription required) http://fundfire.com/articles/20100106/rebound_spending_focus_clients