Moves by two of Australia's big four banks to renew their core banking systems will open up opportunities for specialist financial services software and systems developers. The switch to new banking platforms will give the banks the ability to bring products and service to market faster and enhance their competitiveness - and third party suppliers have a role to play.Earlier this month National Australia Bank announced that it had selected Oracle to work with it on a $1 billion project to replace its core banking system, which handles the processing of customer transactions. The project will run for five years.And in April Commonwealth Bank announced that it would spend $580 million over the next four years overhauling its core system. Its partner on the project is SAP.The chief executive of financial software company FNS, Tony Ward, said modern core banking systems took banks from overnight batch processing to real-time and from paper-based to straight-through processing, which allowed them to undertake development work much faster. Ward said an FNS client in Asia was using its new core system to generate new products every six to nine months, leaving its rivals to play catch-up constantly. Ward said: "These systems can be used as competitive engines."Ward was speaking at Stanford Australia workshop on opportunities and innovation in financial services in Sydney on Friday, sponsored by the NSW government's Australian Technology Showcase and the Australian Information Industry Association. Another speaker at the workshop, Boston Consulting Group partner Richard Helm said: "There are lots of elements that hang off core systems. They support a niche economy of third party players."Helm said one of the things banks discovered when they installed new platform architecture was that they had a big increase in the volume of data at their disposal. "There are lots of opportunities there," he said. "The opportunity for them is to do a lot more analytics. They will be interested in finding out what developers can do for them in that area."There are some very old core banking systems still in operation. We are going to see a wave of change here."Also speaking at the Stanford workshop, a partner in the US venture capital firm FT Ventures, Ben Cukier, said the easiest way for third party software developers to get into the market was to work with the major vendors.Cukier said: "They will get their pound of flesh but it is the best way to overcome integration problems. "FT Ventures is an investor in companies that are innovating in financial services. About half the IT spend by big financial services companies goes to outside providers. "We don't see that changing, although we can expect to see IT spend fall as a result of the industry downturn."Cukier said the focus now was on risk management systems and applications that would allow companies to reduce costs. But the emerging demand was for trading technology that cut out the middle man where possible. Cukier said: "The other thing financial institutions are on the lookout for are systems