The cloud is now the new normal and financial institutions are harnessing and deriving value from the massive amount of data that they possess. Finextra Research’s latest report in association with Amazon Web Services highlights that technology needs to be adopted as quickly, easily and cost-effectively as possible, for scale and flexibility.
‘The Future of Cloud: Powering the Financial Services Industry’ explores how changes in consumer behaviour has led to the modernisation of core systems, the automation of back office processes and the elimination of data silos so that the collection, storage and analysis of this data can be completed efficiently.
Those who utilise the cloud to build and scale new solutions faster and at a lower cost are uncovering new revenue streams and therefore, are today’s true winners. Traditional players cannot keep pace with the increasing veracity of financial data.
90% of the data that exists today was created in the last two years, which means that banks and other financial institutions will need renewed access to accurate data to derive actionable insights. Cloud has encouraged the evolution of decision-making from a guessing game into a science, unveiling a potential for agility, and in turn, long-term growth.
The cloud also eases compliance by providing the capacity to process massive, yet fluctuating amounts of data. In addition to this, the technology’s distributed environment permits an unlimited number of microservices to co-exist and since APIs are self-contained, they can be readily deployed and leveraged in a nimbler fashion for innovation.
On-premises infrastructure prevents FIs from developing, testing, and launching new services to customers quickly and cost-effectively. Banks, payments providers, capital markets firms and insurers are now introducing new channels, applications and solutions that span distribution, analytics, core systems of record and financials.
However, in banking and payments, while there is a focus on the end retail customer experience, this can result in missed opportunities for corporate and business customers. Alongside this, capital markets firms are aggregating traditional market data with alternative data, back-testing trading and investment strategies, delivering more granular regulatory reporting and more.
Most firms have already adopted a cloud-first strategy and FIs are migrating applications and workloads over time as part of a roadmap. Cloud is not only transforming infrastructure; it is altering the logic of how financial services providers solve problems.
Read ‘The Future of Cloud: Powering the Financial Services Industry’ here.