It's a cloudy setting for banks' data crawl

THE next leg of experimentation in the big traditional banks is, intimately, tied to data, but fears over security breaches are stunting progress in this area.

Using cloud computing to store and retrieve data is one big area of focus. Although the security of "private clouds" can soon be ramped up, questions remain over the amount of data that can be stored there.

Jeremy Anderson, the global chairman of financial services at KPMG, said: "Given that banks have got key data-protection issues to deal with, it limits the use of boundless cloud computing, because it could be that data has to be stored in a specific geographic location.