Banking CIO Outlook
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Modernizing the Banking Industry with Cloud Solutions

Banking CIO Outlook | Tuesday, February 07, 2023

As banks modernize and automate their platforms with cloud technologies, they must consider a diverse set of options and challenges as they streamline new business, improve business reputation, and manage multiple platforms simultaneously.

FREMONT, CA: As banks migrate their workloads to the cloud, many emerging solutions, including customer resource management (CRM), financial services, enterprise resource management (ERP), customer engagement, and customer service, are already cloud-based. Their IT strategies are becoming more varied due to cloud services and capabilities. Modernizing and automating banks' platforms with cloud technologies means they confront various choices and challenges, such as solution design, execution, multiple vendor management, and regulatory compliance.

With cross-functional teams, banks are becoming more agile, intuitive, and responsive to continuous change by collaborating with IT teams.

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New business: Banks need to remain agile, scalable, and flexible to compete in this changing landscape, which can only be achieved through digital transformation–automation, acceleration, modernization, and seamless scaling of your business through rapid digital deployment.

The cost and effort involved in migrating workloads to the cloud may be of major concern to financial institutions, along with the skills and expertise required to implement such a strategy - all of which are important factors when companies deploy elaborate workloads while leveraging cloud technologies. An external cloud provider offers capabilities that can shorten the time needed to develop such capabilities internally.

Managing multi-cloud solutions: While multi-cloud is a practical approach for running disjointed, hybrid cloud environments, adopting a multi-vendor and multi-cloud strategy can be complex and challenging. Since providers may offer better pricing flexibility for different cloud platforms, bankers must continuously monitor their offerings as they mature and evolve. With one cloud platform, organizations can move workloads from one cloud to another to better meet business needs and apply best practices.

Brand reputation: Customer experience is the main reason to leverage the cloud in the first place. Digital engagement with banks increased significantly as a result of the pandemic. The result was that bandwidth and capacity were significantly impacted, and customer journeys were experiencing excessive friction and frustration. With cloud-based services, banks can more quickly launch new products, improve customer service, and scale capacity, all of which will enhance customer experience. As a result, customer intimacy and stickiness will increase, resulting in higher revenues.

Leveraging the cloud: Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular with banks due to cost variability, flexibility, compliance, and the ability to deliver a better customer experience. Over the past 30 years, mainframes have handled 90 percent of all credit card transactions in the banking industry.

As a result of shrinking talent pools, high mainframe operation costs, and the perception that cloud technologies make core modernization easier, banks are moving away from mainframes.

Although there are compelling reasons to replace mainframes, many banks cannot do so due to the costs and risks involved. For some workloads like large volume, IO-bound financial transaction applications, mainframe architecture is the most reliable and secure platform for at least the next few years.

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