Disruption, Innovation, Digital Transformation are some of the popular terms in the financial services industry. In fact, the financial services industry is going through a massive transformation, the end customer knows what they want and the control is in their hands. The financial institutions are no longer the brick and mortar premises that we had to visit for service. The service seekers want to be served whenever and wherever they want and at their convenience. This has led to the financial services organisations face a slew of problems across their value chain like:
- Stressed revenue generation due to primaeval sales and marketing strategies
- Increased cost of operations mainly due to digitalisation of services like payments
- Informed and demanding customers with sky-high expectations
- Highly Competitive market especially with the influx of the Fintechs
- Continuous disruption in the industry impacting the business models
- Constantly evolving and intense regulations by regulators
- Technical legacy hindering the transformation journey
The failure of Financial Services (FS) organisations can be largely linked to the IT landscape and their flawed digital transformation initiatives. Lacking rational business cases, lack of understanding of regulatory requirements, misaligned business and technology goals, people issues, skill issues and many more can be the reasons for FS organisations failing to achieve their organisational goals.
For instance, back in 2016 when the Indian Government wanted to curb parallel economy, it discontinued the circulation of certain denominations of currency, which in-effect left the citizens dry with hard cash for their daily necessities. Owing to which, only digital modes of payments like cards and e-wallets were their options. This event tested the digital and online transactions setup of the FS organisations. It was no surprise that the payments systems were crashing as most of the banks’ payments processing engines were not equipped to handle such huge influx of transactions. Mobile Wallets like Paytm and payment gateway service providers like Razorpay turned out to be winners as they had their operations running on Cloud which is the right technology to tackle such surprise spikes.
Cloud enables financial services organisations, an ability to respond quickly to customers’ demands, which gives them a competitive edge. Shifting the workloads to cloud has helped numerous organisations to solve myriad of problems. Here are some of the successful cases where cloud has helped organisations navigate through the rough and steer clear;
- DBS Bank Singapore: Being an early adopter of cloud, DBS bank plans to move all of its public web assets—which support 50% of customer traffic and internet-banking workloads to AWS. With an all-round transformation in place the bank would not only end up with best of the technologies to innovate on, there would be smarter workforce with enhanced skills and more streamlined processes providing delight to all the customers. The bank has been able to serve more customers at a lesser cost. DBS has saved nearly 75 percent costs of running workloads on cloud than on physical data centres. With 7 times more compute and processing power, the bank has also gone green by reducing the power consumption by 10 times.
- Commonwealth Bank of Australia: CommBank has reduced the time and cost of setting up new IT infrastructure from eight weeks and several thousand dollars to eight minutes and 25 cents, making the bank much more active at innovation and address the customer demands.
- Suncorp: Suncorp’s Australia and New Zealand operations have leveraged cloud and its ancillary services to move their applications on to an “optimised platform” which would deliver a sustainable competitive advantage to the bank. Suncorp would utilise the data in their data lake to drive predictive analysis and business intelligence across the group. Cloud adoption and upgrade to their core banking system together will help Suncorp to reduce the bank’s cost-to-income ratio from 53 percent to under 50 percent.
- A leading non banking financial company (NBFC) India: A leading NBFC in India has adopted cloud at different levels of value chain. One of its requirements consisted the need of AWS for customer acquisition and underwriting its consumer durable and SME loans. This has helped the NBFC to approve loans for its consumer durable loans in three minutes. Cloud experts like BlazeClan Technologies assisted this NBFC in choosing the right cloud services and also helped in migrations to meet their desired goals of Digital Transformation journey. The end result was technical overheads had reduced drastically, operational efficiencies increased, employees worked smarter with cloud-based productivity tools like SharePoint and office 365.
- Number of Fintechs across the globe have used cloud to power their business. Fintechs like Simple, Paypal, Rplan, Klarna, Financial Engines, mSwipe, M-Pesa, Flywire, Scripbox, InCred, Lemonade, S&P Capital, as just some of the names that have utilised cloud and are reaping its benefits.
Cloud as a service’s ecosystem consists of cloud service providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and their partners like BlazeClan Technologies, who are experts in migration, implementation and management of cloud services. For a successful implementation and management of cloud services, the execution teams must be cognizant of the aspects like alignment of organizational goals, business and technical assessments, apt solutions and migration plans, these aspects can be covered in detail in subsequent posts which are in the pipeline.
An experienced cloud services partner Like BlazeClan Technologies, who has AWS Financial Competency along with Migration Competency has the right amount of skill set to help an organization to smoothly sail through its digital transformation journey.
Contact us today at sales@139.59.4.14 to know how we can leverage AWS agility for your business requirements. You can also view some of the BlazeClan’s success stories from Financial sector here – Case Study.
