You might expect senior technology people at major financial institutions to be an oppressed and despondent bunch with all the conflicting demands made upon them to do more with less and get it done faster. Maybe that’s largely true and only the raving optimists get invited to do presentations at meetings like the Financial Insights Client Conference held in Boston in September.

So why was William Wray, EVP and CIO of Citizens Financial Group, smiling when he said his charter is to double productivity? He expects to invest in workflow and knowledge management, including portal technology for bank employees. He said that he likes to make it easier for people to do their work, and easier for customers to find information. That is a point echoed by a couple of people in this issue who talk about channel integration and improving sales culture – bank employees do better with customers when they have the information they need about the customers and the bank products at their fingertips. Washington Trust saw a 620 percent increase in sales referrals after conducting sales training and using a customer information and referral system from Fincentric (p. 37). At Citizens, Wray did admit that business disruption planning was a challenging bit of work. Who would have predicted the 9-11 attack and the effect that grounding all the nation’s planes would have on checks? The terrorist attack did prompt Congress to pass the Check 21 legislation that will allow banks to transmit images of checks, rather than the checks themselves, around the country (p. 21). And who would have suspected that major post offices and the nation’s capitol could be shut down by white powder in letter envelopes with hand-scrawled addresses? Or that call centers could be knocked out of action for days by a succession of hurricanes? Disaster recovery is apt to remain a challenge for scenario designers.

Nonetheless, relentless optimism in the face of nature and even regulators was rampant in Boston. Bernardo Nicoletti, chief technology officer at GE Consumer Finance, said he expects his technology budget to stay flat at best, but that’s sufficient because hardware and software prices are going down, although spending on security and compliance is bucking that trend. With a lemonade from lemons approach, he figures GE can gain competitive advantage from regulatory compliance. It gets plenty of practice, he noted, since it does business in 41 different countries, each with its own set of financial regulations.

“Better credit risk management can give us a cost advantage,” he explained. “Manage your market risk and your operational risk and you can improve your position.”

Fortunately the analysts aren’t always so upbeat. Bill Bradway, senior analyst at Financial Insights, tossed a bucket of cold water over dreams of convergence and synergy.

“You think the Solly guys at Citi ever talk to Travelers? Forget it.” Noting that check volumes have finally begun a downward trend even in the US, which accounts for 81 percent of the checks written in the entire world, Bradway suggested this made a difficult case for major investments in check processing. The longer the banks wait to make the investment, the lower their payback. Analysts Aaron McPherson and Jeanne Capachin, in their presentation on Check 21, cited their own survey of banks who had found a solution – they all expected to grow their check processing volumes, even in a downward trending business. Every single one of the banks they talked to expected to pay off new investments in processing with higher volumes. The analysts illustrated their conclusion with a simple PowerPoint cartoon – an ostrich with its head firmly buried in the sand.

Optimism is useful, foolish denial is not.