Why the Finance Industry is Modernizing on the Cloud

For financial institutions (FIs) leveraging the cloud, the earliest adoption was often the high-performance computing grid to support complex modelling. Gone were the days when limited capacity of on-premises mainframes meant that quants or actuaries had to wait for the compute resources they needed to run their models - Across workloads, the cloud allows businesses to immediately scale up compute resources at peak times and scale down when demand dips, paying only for what they use.

From grids, many FIs expanded to development and test environments. While a finite number of test environments can be a bottleneck for innovation, the cloud enables FIs to quickly stand up the environments they need to test their applications. This reduces cost and allows for a faster time to market. It also enables experimentation. Banks, capital markets firms, and insurers are more quickly introducing new channels, applications for the business, and solutions that span distribution, analytics, core systems of record, financials and all stops on the way.

What is Modernization? For most institutions, hundreds of businesses and service applications have been layered within their infrastructures over time, requiring significant IT overhead to maintain. Cost reduction and business growth continue to be top priorities, and firms are discovering that the monolithic architectures, silo-ed data structures and low interoperability of their on-premises core systems no longer meet their needs. Businesses are now modernizing core systems on the cloud to unlock more value for their firm and customers. If reliable security protection, database replication, network hardening and messaging infrastructure are made available, FIs can reconsider where to focus their time and resources.

This, as well as software providers taking over infrastructure management that was previously managed by customers in a data center, has led to an understanding in the financial services industry that software-as-a-service (SaaS), or cloud computing, is the future. Consumer Banking Banks have adopted new digital channels and leveraged the prevalence of data to ensure that customers have friction-less, smart and safe ways of purchasing products and services. More recently, banks have increased efforts to deliver a more personalized experience, addressing common feedback from customers who feel their banks know little about them. When migrating to the cloud, banks are able to access capacity on-demand to run real-time analytics to improve customer experience.

Capital Markets Capital markets firms have changed their business model to be more customer focused, delivering new products and services that enable customers to better manage their money, respond more quickly to market fluctuations and produce higher returns. The cloud has helped drive a reduction in fees and an increase in the sophistication in the tools available to investors. Insurers The insurance industry is also modernizing systems with the cloud, and expanding their work from the core systems into digital customer experiences and advanced analytics. Before, too much of an insurer’s IT budget was relegated to supporting legacy systems. By moving to the cloud, insurers were able to reallocate IT funds from running the business to transforming and growing the business.

The Cloud is The Future of the Finance Industry What’s exciting about the cloud is the ability to simultaneously enable multiple customers while at the same time, reduce operating costs and open up access to innovation for FIs at a much higher velocity and at a lower cost. The cloud is the future and the future is bright. DMDS specializes in private and public cloud technology solutions for finance and FinTech industries. Have you taken the first steps to modernize systems and infrastructure? We have services and answers to questions about security and compliance that can help get your firm started. #DMDSMANAGED #FinTech #HedgeFund