The Polish subsidiary of management consultants Terence Chapman Associates has published a report on information technology priorities in the Polish banking sector based on site visits to 16 local banks. The consultants found that half of those interviewed felt they would benefit from reviewing their overall computing strategy this year and more than half the banks said they were implementing open systems. AS/400 and VAX/VMS systems were popular primarily among larger banks. The consultants found that most of the banks were committed to dealing with a single hardware supplier; only a minority preferred to deal with off-the-shelf software. Most claimed to have established disaster recovery procedures, and these were likely to be reviewed this year. Terence Chapman Associates found it was not possible to quantify spending plans reliably in the report, stating: The shape of the banking sector is continually changing as banks are merging and being acquired. Many Polish banks are undergoing transformation, consequently IT strategies are often only prepared in the short to medium term. The consultants did, however, make it clear that spending is being driven by the desire to establish treasury systems and to connect to the Elixir electronic clearing system; higher profile developments in areas such as credit card systems and the expansion of their automatic teller machine networks were being given a lower priority.
