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More innovation is what SIX, the Swiss stock exchange operator, has put at the heart of its business strategy. Some of the projects presented may not be to the liking of some financial market players however.

SIX, which is the main infrastructure provider for the Swiss financial market, aims to boost its innovative powers in a bid to make the market and its participants more competitive and also to make itself fit for a tough commercial challenge.

In July, SIX gave an indication of how it wants to go about the plan in more detail, when it presented its intent to build a trading platform for digital assets.

Cyber-Attack Surveillance

Now, Chairman Romeo Lacher has unveiled more details of further projects which will present banks with more and concrete innovative services, as he put it on Tuesday in a meeting with the media.

One is a surveillance system against cyber-attacks, and another a wide-reaching cloud solution – not exactly an innovation as such, given a whole number of major companies being active in this business already.

Foreign and Domestic Competitors

Cloud computing, which allows companies to tap into powerful data storage and processing equipment, has huge players such as IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and Cognizant as well as numerous smaller firms; in Switzerland, the national communications champion Swisscom and IT firm Inventx are strong competitors.

Still, Lacher says Swiss banks that work with foreign cloud providers have expressed concern about the safety of their data.

This concern isn’t something new and to hand over data to an external company for processing purposes seems to run contrary to the iron-clad banking principle of promising clients to keep data safe.

Challenge of the Digital Age

This principle is under challenge because the digital age requires a potent processing machine which costs enormous amounts of money to build and maintain. Hence the success of domestic cloud providers such as Inventx, which has contracts with some of the smaller Swiss cantonal banks. Microsoft is the global leader with its Azure solution for international banking firms.

The cloud helps banks save money. UBS for example outsourced one part of the risk management to Azure, doubling the processing performance at a 40 percent discount.

This makes Microsoft or IBM most welcome partners, but there remains a sense of unease, as Lacher confirmed.

U.S. Access to Swiss Data