The banking sector is known to be highly regulated, risk-averse and riddled with legacy systems. For some time now, contender banks and other financial service suppliers have been disrupting this industry and introduced new digital solution backed by modern technology and infrastructure. The established global banks are being pressured to innovate and address their service offerings and aging and cumbersome infrastructure to address the commercial threats. The opportunities that came from utilising cloud infrastructure and technologies were noticed by the commercial banks and cloud adoption programmes started to become more prevalent, in this post we will go over a case with one of our global banking partners.
A large multinational commercial bank has offered bank connectivity payment solutions for their commercial clients for years via different protocols (H2H, file upload, API etc.) and wanted to explore a more uniform, secure, and compliant way to achieve that taking advantage of cloud technology.
Our consultants initiated a discovery project to understand the current landscape (technological, regulatory and customer needs), capabilities and ambitions and recommended a private cloud solution (with the possibility to transform it to public cloud if/when the bank chooses to do so) through which all commercial payment solutions will be routed to. The bank adopted a risk-based approach for the project and initiated a pilot in Denmark for its commercial clients selecting a few corporate clients to participate in it.
The project was led by a mixed team of our consultants, internal resources, and other third-party supplier. Within the pilot project we were able to successfully migrate three corporate clients from their previous connectivity solution to the new private cloud solution, upgrading the security protocol used to connect to the bank and introducing whitelist/blacklist validation as well as payment structure/format validation in a staging area before submitting the payments allowing the customers early feedback and possibility to react before a payment is rejected.
The entire project has been approved by the bank’s compliance team and internal audit to support all regulatory requirements. After completion of the pilot project, we prioritised a migration plan for the remaining customers in that entity and all new corporate clients with connected payment solutions would be offered the private cloud solution. Once the solution was rolled out in that market the remainder of the Nordic markets implemented it before being rolled out in the entire European footprint of the bank.
The results for the bank were enhanced security, limited the number of solutions provided for the same service as well as reduction in risk, operational cost saving by reduction of TCO, cost reduction for the corporate clients both in terms of operational costs and transaction fees due to the reduction of failed and rejected payments. Additionally, the bank was introduced to new cloud solution and built a hybrid set-up of on premise, private cloud, and public cloud solutions.
