The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority only recently gave the green light to storing financial services systems and personal data in clouds when it unveiled proposed guidelines at the end of last year, allowing firms to use the cloud but with appropriate safeguards in place. OakNorth Bank, a new UK challenger bank targeting small- and medium-sized businesses, was among the first to want to try this new opportunity.

The bank says the move allows it to scale up more quickly with fewer resources, enabling it to launch new services and products more efficiently and ultimately boost growth.

Rishi Khosla, co-founder and chief executive of OakNorth, said: “Having our core banking system based in the cloud is an important milestone for us and for the banking industry in the UK. This achievement will enable us to continue scaling the business safely and efficiently.

“This development is proof of the regulator’s willingness to do that and will open up the opportunity for other financial institutions to follow suit.”
Gatis Kaleinis, Knowledgeprice.com board member also emphasizes: “We have had a great honour to work with client, who has been ready to dare, and this is a great example of the fact that Latvian specialists are competitive, knowledgeable and great professionals within the international market. Specific cooperation has strengthen our positions in the IT sector, which is likely to open up new doors for other cooperation projects abroad."

The cloud is a virtual way of providing an outsourced range of IT services over the internet — rather than through a physical computer server.
Using Athena platform, developed by Knowledgeprice.com, the bank's systems were integrated with external storage systems containing information on credit ratings, bank accounts, addresses and other data.