In clouds

The cloud is the catalyst for financial institutions (FIs) to springboard forward, providing the capacity and agility needed for banks, payments providers, capital markets firms and insurance companies to comply with new regulations, keep pace with market volatility and monetise data assets.

Traditional solutions cannot keep up with the growing volume and variety of financial data: 90% of the data that exists today was created in the last two years. This means FIs are seeking new ways to ensure timely access to accurate and usable data and derive meaningful and actionable insights.

A cloud-based data lake allows FIs to store all data in one central repository where it can be more readily available for the application of other technologies such as machine learning (ML) to support security and compliance priorities, realise cost efficiencies, perform forecasts, execute risk assessments, improve understanding of customer behaviour and drive innovation.

In today’s digital world, FIs have easier access to more data and in turn, are creating more data each day. The convergence of regulation and technology, more commonly known as RegTech, eases the burden of compliance and has been used to improve the inefficiencies within regulatory reporting. This promise of a systems evolution or transformation of architecture allows regulators to better monitor systemic and local risk in a data-driven world — and pushes FIs to be fully aware of the data they possess.

The cloud helps traditional banks digitise operations that typically are structured around siloed, on-premises systems, data and processes and enables them to focus on their customers. Banks need to move away from investing in point software applications that only meet the needs of single lines of business in order to reinvent themselves, unpack years of valuable data stored away in siloes and rebuild a 360-degree arc around each customer. This is referred to as being ‘customer-centric.’