Advances in information and communication technology in recent years have given financial services companies more leeway in siting their back-office facilities, an industry observer says.
      "Technology has allowed financial institutions to develop a real estate strategy that's splitting their facilities into customer-facing and non-customer-facing," says Bruce Ficke, managing director for Jones Lang LaSalle. "Customer-facing facilities are operations that banks feel need to be in proximity to their customer base and project some type of image that the customer base is expecting to see. These projects are going to large metropolitan areas.
      "Non-customer-facing space is processing space that doesn't interact with customers," he continues. "Now, banks feel like they don't want all their people in one building. There's a definite trend toward moving this space to markets with low overall real estate costs and population demographics that allow banks to have access to a less expensive work force. That's a big step and banks have fully employed the technology to do it."
      Ficke says financial institutions are also consolidating their data centers into large, hardened facilities with multiple power feeds.
      "The concept of seven by 24 by 365 is so critical to the business environment now," Ficke says. "Data centers are going into markets where they know they will have plentiful power and where they don't have weather or geology issues. You probably won't see them in a hurricane zone or an earthquake-prone area. They need to be up and operational all the time."