09/11/2011
By Scott Thompson
A rapid shift in attitude towards cloud banking is happening within the FS industry.
A Gartner survey found that cloud is the top priority for global FS CIOs and that 39 per cent of those surveyed say that more than half of all their transactions will be supported via cloud infrastructure and SaaS by 2015. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), 44 per cent expect that more than half of all their institutions' transactions will be supported via cloud infrastructure by 2015 and 33 per cent believe that the majority of transactions will be processed via SaaS by 2015.
“Early cloud adoption, especially in the FS sectors, may have been limited to non-core areas and proofs of concept, but it is set to go mainstream, moving the heart of the business, transaction origination and processing, into the cloud,” says Peter Redshaw, managing vice president at Gartner. “Cloud banking should be innovative, dedicated to this industry and transformative. It has the ability to drive ‘creative destruction. As well as helping to improve or optimise an existing service or process, cloud banking can provide the wealth – or the freedom - to try completely new services and processes, such as reverse auctions and third-party core banking systems, maybe even running them in parallel. Successful new cloud services can displace the existing and dominant process for design, distribution or transacting in a disruptive way, rather than just incrementally improving them.”
Although the technology is still immature in many places, cloud is a top priority for banks that need to continue a long-term focus on efficiency and support the CEO's growth strategy by becoming more flexible and agile to support new business models, new markets, new channels, and new products.
