These e-banks do not have physical premises and are able to cut their expenses to the bare bones. Catching up Singapore banks are slightly behind their US counterparts in terms of technology deployment. But they are well aware that they have to respond with cyberspeed to the worldwide e-banking phenomenon. Their customers are demanding much more. The Internet pushes everyone back to the starting point.
Banks can no longer line up projects to be developed sequentially.
Time to market is important. This is a real shift in thinking because most banks usually prefer to have most of the work done in-house to have tighter control of the development. But even more revolutionary is the fact that banks are prepared to collaborate with partners to build new applications. One such example was the Netscape and Citibank collaboration where the former was supposed to provide Citibank with its domain knowledge in web application before releasing this knowledge to the industry at large. According to Ms Toh, NCS is working in collaboration with a leading global bank on a financial planning portal software.