Technology vendors of large-scale administration and other software systems are being pressured by their financial services clients - notably, super funds, banks and insurance companies - to abandon charging licensing fees per user in favour of "platform as a service" type arrangements. This was one industry trend highlighted by Stephen Mackley, chief executive of superannuation software vendor, Financial Synergy, at a lunchtime media briefing earlier this week.  Mackley cited a firm that was not one of his customers as a prime example of this trend: the push by NAB, via its MLC franchise, to replace all user licence fees agreement with IT vendors in favour of with access via "as a service" arrangements.This trend has been given further impetus for the banking sector, Mackley said, with the arrival of the very effective big data applications from the "unstructured information" manager, OpenText, which is closely aligned with major enterprise application software vendor SAP. ING Direct is a Financial Synergy client with a modern digital banking system and its own private cloud-based data storage and business intelligence systems. Nonetheless, according to Mackley, ING is just one of many large banks are said to be "in conversation" with OpenText, attracted by its data analytics functions.