Financial Cloud Summit: three builds to success

Considering inflation rates, the possibility of a recession and the rising cost of skills, how are global companies being impacted by macroeconomic trends? How does this relate to how cloud is consumed and to what extent does the technology take up a substantial part of a company’s IT budget? Are IT budgets decreasing in 2024 when viewed as a proportion of all company revenue? Where is this pressure being felt within organisations, and how can cloud help banks focus more on cost optimisation?

Can the future of financial services be found in distributed cloud, and what are the benefits of this model beyond minimising latency and enabling increased control? What are the advantages of utilising public cloud hybrid and multicloud services that run in a variety of locations? How can data be housed in a distributed system and comply with regulations like GDPR or PCI DSS card data standards? How can distributed cloud applications such as edge computing, IoT, AI and ML be fully leveraged?

In the event of disruption that impacts business continuity, how can moving, or migrating, workloads to other cloud providers, with a multi-cloud approach, help remedy immediate, and long standing, issues? How can banks ensure that multi-cloud approaches are controlled and there is consensus between the financial institution, cloud provider, systems integrator, regulator, and the customer? Why can increased transferability, or migration, and interoperability, provide increased resiliency and cost efficiency via portability?

How can resources be spread across multiple data centres, be scaled up and down to meet demand, and maintain operational resilience? With the drastic rise of interconnected and interoperable systems, how have PSD2, TIPS and SEPA brought attention to the need for holistic security measures across the financial ecosystem? How can banks work with technology providers that offer multi-cloud solutions to make sure they are complying with DORA standards and meeting deadlines? How much resource should be allocated to optimising resilience?

As a business model, BaaS permits any company to provide financial services to customers without a banking license or developing an infrastructure, but what is future role of cloud and APIs? In what ways can this approach help banks reach new segments of customers, provide financial services to regions that are mostly underbanked, or even unbanked, and multiply their direct revenue sources? What are the benefits of core banking platforms and infrastructure being based on cloud beyond improved monitoring of APIs?

As embedded finance gains prominence and integrates financial services into non-financial platforms, what will be the future role of data, AI, and generative AI? While data collected from digital behaviour, open banking and IoT is now being utilised for generate actionable insights about customers, how can organisations refine these offerings, detect financial crime patterns, and identify potential risks? Will AI chatbots be the perfect platforms for financial institutions to offer these personalised recommendations? How can this be taken one step further with generative AI and customised financial services across digital assistants and super apps?

How can a shift to cloud help financial institutions keep pace with current trends and remain competitive with their peers? Why is it important to reduce or eliminate manual processes, and how can a bank decide which processes to keep on-premises, migrate to cloud, or spread across multiple cloud providers? In what ways can financial institutions leverage the greater visibility that this provides, and monitor resource availability and performance? Is there a need for virtual machine clustering, where high availability of a network and servers is ensured to enables multiple functionalities?

With conversations about cloud migration and cloud security being ubiquitous, are there any risks that remain and need to be mitigated? How can data be moved from on-premises to cloud without leading to misconfigured servers and opening up vectors to potential cybercrime? How can financial institutions and technology providers make sure that data is not placed in a vulnerable position whenever there is a server breach? How can predictive technology allow banks to be a step ahead of fraudsters?

While most tech-savvy organisations are using API-first strategies, how can this be furthered to generate faster innovation and greater value from business partnerships? How can banks ensure technical teams are considering the multiple use cases that an API may have in the future, rather than creating APIs to resolve one-off problems? How can financial professionals drive an internal cultural shift to make sure the organisation is prioritising efficiency, speed, growth, resilience and futureproofing?

Should chief innovation officers make hiring skilled developers the centre of a bank’s recruitment strategy in 2024? What are the most sought-after talents, and what can’t cloud providers provide on a business, low code, or no code, level?