To be successful, the bank of the future will need to embrace emerging technology, remain flexible to adopt evolving business models, and put customers at the center of every strategy. Learn how we can help you transform boldly.
Business case development
The Cloud is helping to innovate IT strategy and also becoming a strong engine to quickly develop new capabilities, opportunities, products and services to address business imperatives. Many immensely transformative solutions (e.g., customer relationship management, finance, enterprise resource management) already are cloud-based – they are just not primarily communicated as such. A cloud business case should emphasize how the bank can cost-effectively tap into cloud-delivered solutions to drive customer insights, experiences, and offers; grow revenue; lower costs; find and onboard better talent; and provide more consistent enterprise operating platforms. It also should include a benchmark cloud value-assessment model to map the economics of changing market forces, pricing, and business assumptions and aid in scenario planning. Finally, the business case should address change management issues: Cloud technology will dramatically alter certain employee roles; what steps may be needed to help adapt the organization’s culture and mindset?
Solution design and execution
It is obvious, the cost and effort to migrate workloads to the cloud may be a major concern for financial institutions contemplating executing cloud strategies. Cost-effectiveness and time management to market are key factors when organizations are looking to leverage business-building technologies such as big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. External cloud providers offer these and other capabilities that can shorten development time versus building capabilities in-house.
Vendor management
The banking industry is presently transitioning through both hybrid and multi-cloud environments and will continue to do so for years to come. During this lengthy period, vendors likely will be offering new, cloud-based services and capabilities on a regular basis along with regular updates. Financial services organizations should avoid specific vendor lock-in so that they can adapt to rapid and specific marketplace changes without having to re-platform when moving from one vendor to another. As vendors reach maturity, they may offer competitive pricing flexibility by leveraging different cloud platforms that enable an institution to move workloads from one cloud to another in order to meet business needs, and also help them apply best practices built on one cloud platform to departments using other cloud vendors. Adopting a multi-vendor/multi-cloud strategy can be complex and challenging; developing a common understanding of architectural components and governance strategy enables optimal use of multi-cloud environments.
Better and Robust Security
Today, data security concerns are a top of mind issue as well as potential issues for bank leaders with cybersecurity being an ever-changing field with many potential players and risks. A crucial part of understanding the cloud is considering how an organization’s current infrastructure and capabilities may be limiting its ability to detect and address new risks, weak points, as well as future risks and cyber threats – how cloud technology can help. Security is very diverse in the cloud because of the tools that are native to each cloud provider’s environment and the fact that cloud providers generally take full responsibility for the security of the lower-level infrastructure layers. This shared security responsibility between cloud providers and customers they host changes how institutions should anticipate and prepare for security risks.
Regulatory compliance
Cloud computing technology can help banks and financial services firms see face to face ever-evolving regulatory reporting requirements (e.g., Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review, Solvency II) in multiple operating jurisdictions-a critically important capability in an industry where cross-border transactions are the norm. Cloud solutions also help banks and financial institutions conduct intraday liquidity and risk calculations, and mine trade surveillance data to detect anti-money laundering and other fraud issues. A cloud platform also enables data-brokering placement capabilities based on data criticality and Certified Safety Professional certifications.
