How Cloud Computing Helps The Financial Services Sector

Evolving customer expectations, emerging technologies, and increasing alternatives to standard business models are forcing financial services to start putting new strategies in place that help them be better prepared to deal with the onslaught of changes. There is an increasing awareness within financial institutions and services that the cloud is more than just a technology but a destination that enables the collection, storage, and processing of data from multiple sources while facilitating the modernization of outdated operating models and legacy systems.

Leading cloud providers offer an array of many innovative product-as-a-service (PaaS) that can be easily accessed, and this enables financial services to implement business and service operating models that can help provide increased security, better revenue generation, improve customer insights, reduce costs, and deliver relevant products quickly and efficiently.

Let's look at how cloud computing can benefit the sector in leading the financial digital transformation.

Benefits of Cloud Computing For The Financial Services Sector

• Security: Financial services must maintain much higher safety standards than other businesses for protecting sensitive and proprietary information. Cloud security solutions can offer multiple, multilayer protection of sensitive data. Cloud environments usually use industry-standard security frameworks to provide a secure workspace or environment per government regulations. Cloud computing gives data protection using standard tools, policies, security solutions, and best practices, offering the highest level of data security. Cloud providers offer a broad range of approaches, technologies, and controls that strengthen the safety of data, apps and overall infrastructure from potential threats. Stringent compliance controls and multiple layers of protection against data breaches, hacking, and other attacks ensure the data is protected.
• Compliance: The digital world faces increasing risks, making compliance essential for all businesses, especially financial institutions. Cloud computing ensures compliance by taking the necessary steps in data security and managing risks. Cloud services offer several dynamic tools and features to manage network security, access controls, data encryption, and configuration management. Cloud computing can help financial institutions meet regulatory compliance requirements per the financial industry standards.
• Reduced costs: The most visible benefit of cloud computing over the in-the-premises working model is the ease of adaptability as per the institution's need. With cloud hosting, organizations can scale the IT infrastructure as needed, ensuring no delay in scaling up or down without compromising on the services offered. As most cloud services offer a pay-as-you-go pricing model, financial institutions can reduce or eliminate on-premises infrastructure costs by moving applications and data on the cloud.
• Faster processing: Cloud platforms are scalable, designed for fast performance and can handle vast volumes of data transfers easily and quickly. This reduces transaction processing times and latency while processing data, effectively increasing the data volumes that can be processed.
• Reliability: Cloud computing data centers offer backup disaster recovery facilities and the data is mirrored at multiple sites making it a more reliable option than an onsite data center.
• Eliminating mundane tasks: When the infrastructure is moved to the cloud, the IT department workforce becomes free from routine maintenance, daily security checks and compliance. This removes the need for additional staffing and helps put the existing workforce focus their time and energy on specific issues that must be addressed urgently.
• Consistent follow up: Customer satisfaction translates into an enhanced customer experience. This can be achieved by constantly following up regarding the services provided. Cloud computing helps engage with customers for service support to resolve issues quickly without hampering the customer's work processes. Cloud computing allows continuous check on customer's requirements to ensure quick solutions. Cloud computing helps in refining client experience and offers efficient computing resources and analytics to understand customer behavior.
• Personalized experience: Using the big data for analytics can provide financial services with vital information regarding customer preferences, needs, behavior etc. This information can deliver personalized experiences and interactions to the customer. It allows them to reach targeted customers accurately and efficiently and transform the customer experience.

 Conclusion

Cloud computing offers numerous advantages for the financial services sector. With growing competition from the fintech companies, cloud computing provides convenience for the customers of the financial services. With interconnected data systems, the financial industry can use cloud services to give better customer service, make better and faster decisions based on the data. Advanced analytics, ML and AI  need sizable infrastructure and resources that may not be available to many financial services. Cloud computing ensures that infrastructure and digital resources are readily available and deployable. Cloud computing is here to stay, and the future of finance relies on using cloud infrastructure.