Abdulla Hashim, VP marketing, enterprise solutions, Etisalat opened the forum and drew attention to the developments affecting the sector like the rise of global financial centres, growth of Islamic banking and stringent regulatory requirements. From an telecom and ICT perspective, he said, "Financial institutions and banks need to find a service provider who can provide them with highly available telecom and ICT infrastructure and managed end to end solutions while meeting regulatory requirements. This is where Etisalat is playing a leading role by offering a complete end to end telecom and ICT solutions portfolio including the flexibility to outsource their non core IT needs"

Peter Farley, MD, EMEA, Financial Insights gave participants an overview of the challenges facing the banking centre and the need for them to innovate to improve the customer service experience. He spoke about the need for integrated mobile.IT/Telco solutions in the face of challenges like channel and process integration, developing "real time" banking and growing incidence of security threats. He also elaborated on the convergence of technology and talked about the growing impact of mobility and seamless convergence of IT & Telecom to offer multiple devices & multiple access points for customer convenience.

Mohammed Al Qassim, executive director, DIFC also spoke at the conference and talked about their experience in deploying the BlackBerry mobility solution for their needs. With Etisalat's BlackBerry Enterprise server solution, DIFC has been successful in deploying applications to enhance productivity through access to financial news feeds and internal enterprise applications. The solution has also helped to improve employee effectiveness in the field , reduce cost of data and enhanced customer service by being always available.

Etisalat's IP Connect service was also featured during the event. Participants were able to learn more about this new data network which will be the base of any future unified platform to run converged voice and data applications. This will lead to enhanced performance and better ROI for companies.

The forum also featured a talk from Mark Akass, chief technology officer, BT Radianz on Etisalat's partnership with BT(British Telecom) and the benefits of the Radianz shared market infrastructure in providing a continuous, 24-hour global trading environment.