Beyond cost savings, what unexpected benefits have financial institutions discovered after moving to the cloud? What strategic advantages has it enabled?
Alasdair Anderson: I would challenge the assumption that moving to the cloud is a cost saving. The biggest benefit is faster innovation cycles and the ability to rapid scale or burst processing beyond on-premise capacity.
Cloud-native and hybrid architectures enable financial firms to deploy and test new services more rapidly, shortening time-tomarket for digital banking products. Additionally, the democratisation of AI and analytics has allowed even mid-sized institutions to leverage advanced risk models and fraud detection systems, capabilities once exclusive to only the biggest banks.
Barath Narayanan: Financial institutions have realised key strategic advantages beyond cost savings after migrating to the cloud. Cloud platforms have improved agility by enabling rapid deployment of new products and services, fostering innovation through serverless architectures and AI / ML tools like AWS SageMaker and Google Cloud AI, enabling rapid deployment of new trading algorithms and fraud detection models.
Real-time data processing and advanced analytics have enhanced decision-making and risk management capabilities during market volatility.
Cloud infrastructure’ s scalability has facilitated global expansion, allowing institutions to quickly provision resources in new markets and ensure localised services with low latency.
Built-in redundancy, automated failover and disaster recovery have strengthened business continuity and minimised downtime.
Advanced security features like IAM and encryption services simplify compliance with industry regulations.
Cloud architectures enable open banking and embedded finance via seamless API integrations with fintech platforms.
Additionally, cloud-based collaboration tools allow global teams to work seamlessly across unified platforms, fostering efficiency and faster decision-making.
Cloud has become a strategic enabler of growth, differentiation and long-term competitiveness.
Ramandeep Singh: Adopting cloud technologies and platforms correctly can bring cost savings, but there are additional benefits that often overshadow the cost advantages. The are listed in the box opposite.
102 April 2025