CIBC’s cloud-first strategy helps drive the bank’s hybrid ‘high-touch, high-tech’ digital transformation

Across industries, empowering innovation means modernization and digitization. Organizations are looking to take advantage of the innovation and agility that the cloud enables, while also integrating with existing technology investments and unlocking data in older systems.?

CIBC has spent the past several years on a transformation journey. As a leading North American financial institution with 10 million personal banking, business, public sector, and institutional clients, the organization is embracing a cloud-first approach.

Last week for Ignite, I?caught?up with Christina Kramer, the bank’s Senior Executive Vice President for Technology, Infrastructure, and Innovation, and Richard Jardim, CIBC’s Chief Information Officer, to discuss how CIBC's strategy is helping it get ahead and thrive in the?rapidly evolving and regulated?banking industry.?

CIBC’s growth strategy is cloud-first.

The bank’s goal of enabling clients to achieve its ambitions has been the driving force behind its hybrid ‘high touch high tech’ digital transformation — and embracing the cloud has enabled CIBC to become more efficient, accelerate innovation, and respond faster while building in deep layers of security, compliance, and resilience.

This cloud-first approach has allowed CIBC to develop new capabilities to serve its clients and identify collaboration opportunities with partners – both within and outside of its ecosystem. Additionally, it is helping to increase speed, agility, and resiliency, and to drive both business value and innovation.

Ultimately, the goal is to reduce the risks around managing these highly complex environments while also using data to serve clients. By bringing everything together in a single pane of glass, CIBC will be moving towards unified visibility and control, greatly simplifying its IT and giving them room to innovate.

Tools and services in the cloud empower CIBC to harness its data estate.

The opportunity for growth in the banking space is huge since data is everywhere. Innovation accelerates when that data can be used rapidly for the benefit of clients.

This means real-time data is becoming increasingly important, as is the cloud’s role in enabling an organization to quickly democratize and translate data into insights. CIBC has spent the last several years building this capability. Today, the bank is focused on leveraging AI tools with the speed of cloud services to turn its wealth of data into insights that help inform employees so they can offer impactful advice for clients.

Cloud skills offer new professional development opportunities for CIBC’s talent.

Aside from business growth, CIBC has also seen the cloud positively impact its talent development efforts through increased opportunities to invest in employee learning. Since July, CIBC employees have taken more than 2,000 courses, and the bank has partnered with Microsoft Azure experts to help the organization further build capabilities.

This democratization of knowledge and learning has a direct impact on business growth – and it embodies what it means to be truly cloud-first. By bringing its cloud environment and IT staff along together, CIBC is creating a flywheel of innovation that keeps the momentum going.

You can see a video of my conversation with Christina and Richard below. To hear more stories of innovation from customers in a host of industries, make sure to check out the host of resources available following Ignite.