Cloud Series: Cloud in Finance

The finance industry is continually increasing its cloud usage. As the race towards cloud accelerates, many are looking past CSP's. According to Gartner, many banks are moving towards hosting their cloud solutions on their own network, reducing the usage of external vendors. Banks use cloud computing for a variety of reasons including customer relationship management (CRM), fraud detection, and data analysis.

Security

Cloud solutions allow for scalable and more accurate fraud detection solutions. To detect fraud, banks need to analyze large amounts of data from multiple sources, and the high-performance computing provided by cloud services, like supervised machine learning, allows this. Financial services are expanding their ecosystems and complex multi-cloud environments can be targeted by cyber threats. Cloud provides tailored cybersecurity for organizations and their clients with the added ability to deploy sophisticated security within minutes or hours. Proactive capabilities ensure that any threats or security incidents are prevented from ever happening.

CRM

Cloud-based CRM systems enable banks to manage their customer data and interactions. Banks use this data to provide personalized services based on the customers preferences. Ultimately, the cloud helps personalize customer relationships at scale. Instead of employees individually interacting with customers, the CRM can deploy a management strategy for thousands of clients.

With customers evolving the ways they manage their wealth, so must financial service organizations evolve the tools they use to provide services. Clients, more than ever, want to be actively involved. The cloud equips financial service organizations with the proper tools to deliver insights, advice, and personalized experiences to better build relationships with their clients.

Artificial intelligence/Machine Learning

Security and insight creation from client data can be driven by machine learning and automation. AI and ML can be used to create predictive models and visualization technology to drive decisions. In a previous article, we discussed how factors such as season, market conditions, and others (interest rates, etc.) can be inputted to provide solutions to clients. AI can readily take on the big data that financial institutions continue to create to provide deep insights that otherwise may be missed by human efforts.

Conclusion

Cloud technologies in the finance industry will continue to transform client relations, wealth management, and big data analysis. Banks can leverage cloud technology to provide solutions to their customers’ changing needs and to better position themselves in their respective competitive market. Without the need to upgrade expensive on-premises hardware, the cloud enables many financial service organizations to scale at will and increase their speed-to-market. They can adopt intuitive security and reduce their operational costs while enhancing the relationships with their clients.