An online investment bank, established in the 1990s with 30% of staff in the IT area – does that sound like a good idea? It does if you are Ole Rossing, CIO at Saxo Bank. Founded in 1992 and granted European bank status in 2001, Saxo could be a model for the future of financial services.
It certainly is not a model of the past, says Mr Rossing. “Twenty years ago, HP and IBM were running the technology in banks on long-term contracts. In many places it is still the case, banks are running on these big systems. We grew slowly and added servers where necessary – we have 250 now – but we never needed mainframes or external people to tell us how to set up our storage system.”
