Banking on the Cloud: Accelerating Away from the Pack

Earlier this month at Celent’s Navigating Turbulence event, my colleague Craig Focardi hosted a session on cloud adoption in banking. Hot on the heels of that, I had the pleasure of attending the AWS Financial Services Analyst Summit, followed up by the Financial Services Symposium on day 2 (no Amazon pun intended). I appreciate the invitation from AWS to keep Celent informed and engaged in relevant product, partner, and client news. Although there were product updates on AWS AI developments, the event was led primarily through a narrative of client success, and it was a pleasure to meet with several bank executives who shared their journeys to the AWS cloud.

For the overall event, the sub-theme was not “why,” but “how?” – the question that comes after making a commitment to move to the cloud. That posture correlates well to Celent research which showed migrating workloads to public cloud as the highest priority in corporate banking technology. (Note that our 2023 technology spending survey is in progress and early results indicate this remains a top priority – so watch this space)!

Corporate Banking Technology Priorities

Question: In which of the following areas are you focusing your technology investments in 2022?

Source: Celent Banking IT Strategy Survey 2021/22

However, there are still banks that are unable or unwilling to adopt cloud services from even the top providers. Perhaps there’s a third question on the table – “why not?”

At the risk of digressing slightly, cast your mind back 12 years to business events of 2011. According to CNN and Fortune Magazine, Walmart sat atop the Fortune 500, three of the top five were oil companies, and the largest tech firm was Hewlett Packard weighing in at number eleven. Of today’s cloud giants, Microsoft was #38 and Amazon (with the .com suffix in those days) was #78, and Google at #92. Google bought Motorola (wait, remember that?), Microsoft bought Skype, and Apple introduced Siri. For fun, you could go back a further 12 years to 1999 and look at the technology world then. Dial-up modems, no wi-fi, no smartphones, and the USB thumb drive had just been just invented which would replace those delicate 3.5” floppy disks that could only store 1.44MB!

Why 12 years to 2011? To show how much technology has changed, evolved, and matured. On a personal level, it is now 12 years since I was first involved at Microsoft in the cloud value proposition for financial services. Those early days were challenging, and only a limited set of financial services workloads were truly viable back then. In response to the high demands of banks and their regional regulators, an awful lot of hard work has been done in the last 12+ years by all the major cloud providers, their ecosystem partners, and vanguard banks like Capital One.

Until recently, cloud laggards could take some comfort in that, one day, they might ride the coattails of cloud pioneers. The late movers could learn from others and build on proven platforms. However, the gap between leaders and laggards looks set to widen further. The strategic importance of the cloud in banking goes further than productivity tools, enterprise systems, and even migration of banking applications. The cloud is where development of new products and services happens. The recent AI excitement – and the real possibilities beyond the hype – will give cloud adopters yet another advantage.

The value of the cloud to banking is not merely about expanding on new infrastructure. Machine learning and AI at scale, integrated with applications, will enable cloud adopters (banks and vendors) to build new “intelligent solutions” and accelerate away from the on-premise pack at an increasing rate. Over time, the number of on-premise banking solutions will decline, or will have deprecated features compared to cloud counterparts. This will inevitably reveal new risks for banks and limit execution capabilities. Now, in 2023, banks must consider the full range of risks and lost opportunities incurred by not adopting cloud solutions in at least some parts of the business.