Enterprises of all sizes and verticals are adopting the cloud as a result of being driven by the business needs of agility, scalability and flexibility. The upward trend of global cloud expenditure is testament to the growing industry needs and the acceptance of cloud as a key pillar of the digital transformation journey. Further, customer expectations, dynamic markets and disruptive environments have fueled the rapid shift to cloud.
Driving True Business Value with Cloud in Financial Services
The last couple of years have seen the cloud conversations evolve from TCO to driving business value for enterprises. As enterprises look at cloud beyond the lens of TCO, it is evident that cloud helps businesses in ways that go beyond reducing TCO or moving from a CapEx to OpEx model. Cloud brings in benefits such as:
Efficiency and Agility
With cloud, businesses can provision assets or services on demand reliably and predictably. Cloud services are scalable and elastic to meet dynamic demand with negligible intervention. Businesses can streamline their operations with cloud and enjoy greater resilience and speed. Cloud also supports businesses to develop solutions and products rapidly with lower time to market and better reach.
Strategic utilization of cloud enhanced by technical factors such as workflow portability and seamless integration brings different parts of the business together. This provides a whole host of benefits such as enhanced collaboration and productivity with effective data management.
Businesses can integrate cloud with capabilities such as AI, ML, IoT and AR/VR to create intelligent solutions and deploy them swiftly. With cloud analytics, organizations can identify patterns in data, derive insights and make data driven decisions.
Focus on Business and Innovation
Cloud also helps enterprises with innovating at scale. Relieving employees of mundane tasks and allowing them to focus on tasks directly linked to the business fosters innovation and a better customer experience.
With a consumption-based pricing model, organizations can also use cloud computing to rapidly test ideas and hypothesize in a cost-effective manner, thereby enabling better decision making when it comes to pursuing them or not.
New Business Models
Businesses can use the cloud to drive revenue through hitherto unexplored streams by offering innovative value propositions and exploring new avenues that the cloud enables. XaaS and subscription business models powered by servitization of products and services can open up predictable streams of revenue for businesses.
Additionally, cloud supports and provides for hybrid and remote work, while also enabling an omni-channel experience.
Cloud and Emerging Technologies
On the other hand, there are cases of cloud integration with emerging technologies such as 5G and quantum computing whose impact on business value cannot be evaluated accurately at the moment. However, the underlying potential is immense and organizations that choose to innovate in these domains are likely to develop a significant competitive advantage.
Cloud in Financial Services
Cloud enables the digital transformation journey for financial institutions, while endowing it much-needed agility, efficiency, and an enhanced experience. The adoption of cloud in the BFSI is often debated due to concerns around regulatory compliance, security, and legacy applications. However, with a user base that is increasingly going digital, these institutions are under pressure to meet customer expectations for digital services
- With cloud, financial institutions can look at better data management to deal with the massive amounts of data and level up to meet dynamic user demand.
- Financial institutions are positioned to reap a lot of value from the cloud with technology and business team members working together in cross-functional teams.
- They can accelerate migration to the cloud by following a top-down approach i.e., domain level as against a bottom-up approach of migrating disparate applications.
- A well-configured cloud setup enhanced by partnerships with experienced cloud solution providers can help organizations remain compliant while adding additional layers of security beyond those possible in an on-premise environment.
- With access to AI, ML and automation with the cloud, financial institutions can also look towards better risk assessment and data driven decision making.
- Hybrid or multi-cloud approaches can be used for increased flexibility for processing in a public cloud while critical data can be safely guarded with on premise data centers.
- With cloud, entry barriers are lower, and the playing field has been levelled for new players as can be seen in the case of digital banks and the current crop of fin-tech startups that are setting the pace for the industry.
- Financial institutions can capitalize on opportunities to automate everything, starting from infrastructure (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, policies (PaC) and security (SaC) to FinOps (financial operations).
- Edge computing can be leveraged to provide instant, hyper-personalized, secure customer experiences across devices and platforms, provided that security precautions are taken while interfacing with cloud
Businesses can no longer continue to treat the cloud as a futuristic technology whose time has not yet come. The future is already here and transitioning to the cloud is no longer a choice, but a necessity. It is critical for businesses to make a well-informed decision and create a holistic roadmap for their transition to the cloud.
Birlasoft can help you on your journey to becoming a cloud-first organization.
Merchant Onboarding and Transaction Processing Platform
A financial services organization wanted a unified digital platform to support multiple lines of business for credit financing with integration to multiple systems. They also wanted to reduce onboarding time and simplify the process for new loan and card applications.
The focus was on standardizing technology, minimizing investment and operational costs, optimizing business process flows for enhanced response times and a faster turnaround to implement upcoming business changes and enhancements.
The Solution
Birlasoft helped to build a single platform with hybrid architecture – a PCF Cloud & Microservices platform integrated with third party systems and Amazon Alexa. This framework was container-agnostic with high availability and scalability that would help generate legal documents on the fly while maintaining document formats easily. The custom solution provided a scalable and robust platform to onboard new merchants/providers using self-registration, serve loan/card origination, processing, contract document preparation, credit card transaction processing and generate sales slips and various reports.
The Outcome
The platform enabled seamless merchant onboarding, instant credit applications, private label and bankcard transaction processing through a mobile and web application. The platform had multiple levels of security enabled for secured access and was built on frameworks that resulted in enhanced system reliability, capacity, and reduced loan/sale cycle time.