OREANDA-NEWS. October 14, 2015. Cognizant has ranked fourth on the 2015 FinTech Forward rankings of the top 100 technology providers to the financial industry.

FinTech Forward, a collaboration of American Banker and BAI, brings together the research, media, and event capabilities of banking’s top two professional information and education organizations.

The initiative includes the annual FinTech Rankings of technology vendors to the financial services industry and new proprietary research and market analysis conducted by BAI and American Banker to identify the forces and trends that are motivating banks’ technology investment.

Financial Services is one of the key industry sectors served by Cognizant and represented approximately 41.8% percent of Cognizant’s revenue in calendar year 2014.

In a slideshow featuring leaders from the Top 10 FinTech Forward companies (slide 5), Americanbanker.com quotes Prasad Chintamaneni, President of Banking and Financial Services at Cognizant, as saying that an important technology for banks in the coming year is software that integrates all of the digital channels that customers use to access their bank.

Chintamaneni explains that with the integration, a customer's transaction could begin in one channel and continue in another. Among other advantages, this integration increases cross-selling opportunities for the banks.

“Customer experience management as a planned initiative has a huge payoff for banks right now, if they can do it right,” he says.

According to Chintamaneni, another big category of spending for banks is risk and regulatory compliance, with custom initiatives implemented on tight deadlines.

He adds that cybersecurity is another area of big technology spending by banks, including access control, IT risk, and IT security software, as is analytics and big data.