A rapid shift in attitude towards cloud banking is happening within the financial services (FS) industry, according to Gartner.

A recent survey of global CIOs conducted by the firm found that 39% of financial sector tech heads expect that more than half of all their transactions will be supported via cloud infrastructure and software as a service (SaaS) by 2015.

Peter Redshaw, managing vice president at Gartner, says: "Early cloud adoption, especially in the FS sectors, may have been limited to non-core areas and proofs of concept, but it is set to go mainstream, moving the heart of the business, transaction origination and processing, into the cloud."

Rather than just focussing on incremental cost savings, cloud computing creates the opportunity for banks to try completely new ways of working, says Redshaw, citing examples such as reverse auctions and parallel running of core banking systems.

In the core banking market, both Misys and Temenos have committed to providing core banking services to customers via Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud-based platform.

Says Redshaw: "Successful new cloud services can displace the existing and dominant process for design, distribution or transacting in a disruptive way, rather than just incrementally improving them."