Banking on the Cloud
Narrator: Banks and other financial institutions have long relied on facilities like this to help them store, operate and organise data, physical servers that are costly to run and vulnerable to equipment failure and loss of power. No wonder so many are accelerating their move to the cloud, which allows them to access data and computing services over the internet, instead.
Michael Ruttledge: I think there’s a realisation that to compete in this marketplace, you have to deliver at speed, and to deliver at speed, you need to deliver cloud native applications. If you look at what some of the digital banks have done, or what some of the FinTechs have done, they’re able to deploy very rapidly. We’ve been able to replicate that in a cloud environment.
Mohit Joshi: Banks are increasingly benchmarking themselves with technology companies, in terms of…you know, in terms of the speed, in terms of customer satisfaction, [and] in terms of people who they could potentially be competing with, you know, for clients. They are seeing with a great deal of envy, the multiples and the valuations that tech companies have, that FinTechs have, and they’re keen to get there as well.
Michael Ruttledge: Last year, we did over 900 different releases on our mobile application. I…I don’t think that would have been possible, I know it wouldn’t have been possible in a traditional environment.
Narrator: Bank spending on cloud services is forecast to grow over 16 per cent a year through to 2024. That compares with annual increases of just 4.5 per cent for overall IT spending.
Mohit Joshi: This is clearly something that has the board’s attention. We speak to boards of almost all the large banks. Technology is the number one topic that is on the agenda. Now part of it is cybersecurity, right? There’s a huge risk element that banks and insurers are really afraid about falling behind.
Narrator: The cloud has now become one of the biggest battlegrounds for tech talent, with 95 per cent of companies citing it as a major roadblock, but those that did prioritise tech talent are now ahead of the game.
Michael Ruttledge: Now we’ve taken mainframe programmers and converted them to full stack engineers in job. At the same time, we also did a lot of time.
Mohit Joshi: Customer behaviour is changing, right? The way customers buy things and consume services is changing. The demographics of our customer base are changing. The world is becoming, despite everything else, is becoming much more globalised and the cloud will be, you know, a vehicle to provide these advanced capabilities to banks and insurers.
Michael Ruttledge: My aspiration is to be, by 2025, out of our own data centres, and I’m fully in the cloud. And I think as I as I speak to a lot of my peers, they’re on a very similar journey.
