HFS Launches Banking and Financial Services Practice

Technology and services analyst HFS Research has launched a Banking and Financial Services (BFS) practice, led by SVP Elena Christopher who is based in the US.

UK-headquartered HFS provides insight into the innovations impacting business operations, including automation, AI, Blockchain, IoT, digital business models and smart analytics. Its new practice will aim to help BFS firms on their digital transformation journeys and will release the BFS 2021 Top 10 report later this month, as well as the BFS Industry Primer, providing a detailed look at demand-side trends. In addition, the division will produce a series of reports around demand-side research and voice of the customer research, spotlighting enterprise cloud journeys in financial services, as well as examining the role of emerging tech in the sector.

Christopher (pictured) joined the firm in 2017 from business process services firm Conduent (previously Xerox Services). Before this she was MD, Research, Risk & Compliance at DTI; VP, Financial Services at Mobius Knowledge Services; VP, Research & Analytics at OfficeTiger/RR Donnelley, where she built the firm's offshore Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) practices; and Global Research Director at Gartner.

Commenting on the launch, Christopher said: 'We need to get more specific about what we mean by digital transformation and how to achieve it. Many sub-segments of the financial services sector were 100% certain they were digitally transformed pre-pandemic. It took a global pandemic to lay bare the precise lack of connectivity between front-end customer engagement tools and the myriad of back-office systems that actually run banks. We want to help the BFS sector contextualize the journey to the 'OneOffice' and get specific about how to get there. And we'll try not to say 'cloud' too many times'.

Web site: www.hfsresearch.com .