Freewill Solutions Co., Ltd., a leading provider of business and technology consulting services, has released the results of its first annual “Thai Securities CIO Survey and Benchmarking Study”.  The study, the first of its kind, was executed in order to track IT trends in the Thai securities market and saw some vital issues surface: ones that the industry will need to look closely at.

“As the leading provider of technology and business solutions to the Thai securities industry, we wanted to give industry members a picture of how well they are progressing relative to their competitors”, said Dr. Veera Veerakool, CEO of Freewill Solutions.  “This is the first year that we conducted this survey and the findings were very informative and we expect more participation and more significant insights after next year’s survey” he stated.

David Aldridge, Freewill Solutions’ project leader for the survey, noted that one of the overall findings was that Thai stock brokers have a “clustering mentality”, whereby they try to do the same things as their competitors when it comes to IT, rather than differentiate themselves. Aldridge indicated that there were three areas in the survey that can be viewed as leading indicators as to how well prepared individual Thai stockbrokers are for the upcoming deregulation which, of itself, is expected to result in more competition. These indicators are:

1. Level of IT investment
2. Types of projects that  Thai Stockbrokers are undertaking or have planned;  and
3. Effectiveness of internal IT processes and skill sets

“In terms of the level of investment in new IT applications, our survey results show that Thai securities companies spent more on IT in 2007 than they did in 2006; however, these investment levels are a fraction of IT investment levels of similar companies in more mature markets like the US.  Furthermore, several of our survey respondents cut way back on IT investments in 2007”, commented Aldridge.  “This cutback, combined with the fact that the majority of IT investments were aimed at supporting core transaction processing systems, means that these brokers are not investing in systems that distinguish them from their competitors and help them to woo and retain customers in a future deregulated market, for example customer relationship management or CRM.  We believe that this subset of brokers will thus be disadvantaged in the future”.

The survey and the accompanying analysis highlighted a number of fundamental actions that Thai securities companies should undertake to prepare themselves for industry deregulation over the next few years. 

Freewill Solutions plans to conduct the survey, and release its results, annually.