Today was a difficult day for US banks. In Cincinnati, the “only bank you’ll ever need” took a 44% hit to their stock. As you can see from the chart below, the last year has been a difficult one for them.
Wachovia, who ironically had the ad below running on the Wall Street Journal web site today, had its assets assumed by Citibank. Other large regional banks are weakened and assumed to be looking for suitors.
The real question is will the weakness of the financial sector harm business intelligence initiatives? Or will the expected rush of shotgun bank mergers and new regulations create a new wave of data integration and business intelligence initiatives? Certainly, there will be another round of business intelligence standardization as new combined banking entities look through their portfolio of overlapping products and align around a single vendor (or at least reduced number of vendors).
