Leading financial firms worldwide are accelerating their transition to cloud-based solutions in order to strengthen cybersecurity, improve fraud detection capabilities, and enhance claims management, according to a recent report commissioned by Snowflake, the data cloud company.
The growing urgency stems from the increasing frequency of high-profile cyber attacks and financial crimes, coupled with heightened media and regulatory scrutiny. To safeguard data and maintain robust security and governance measures, technology teams are actively investing in cloud technologies.
The report emphasises the need for financial organisations to address evolving threats and combat the rise of financial crimes, particularly with the rapid digitalisation of banking and payment systems.
By leveraging advanced cloud data analytics, firms can drive innovation by enabling real-time fraud and anomaly detection, enhancing customer experiences, and responding more effectively to sophisticated criminals with deep knowledge of banking processes, controls, and vulnerabilities.
‘Highest levels of data security’
Rinesh Patel, global head of financial services at Snowflake, underlined the importance of achieving improved customer and commercial outcomes with the highest levels of data security and governance.
“With demands for data higher than ever, the opportunity cost is rising for firms that stick with legacy technologies. Firms will need to leverage the value of cloud technology to tackle increasing financial crime, improve the propensity for data insight, and support the data-rich needs of today’s customers.
“Be it quant researchers seeking to analyse more data to backtest strategies, banks striving to create a new suite of sustainable finance solutions, or underwriters seeking to price risk more accurately — they all need to power their workloads on the cloud with flexibility, scale, and performance to deliver business outcomes.”
The survey
Snowflake’s Financial Services Cloud Pulse Survey gathered insights from 311 global C-suite leaders and senior-level technology executives in the banking, asset management, and insurance sectors. The survey focused on cloud data competency, addressing industry challenges, decision complexity, enterprise strategies, and business impact.
While nearly half of the respondents (48.7 per cent) anticipate implementing their future data cloud strategies within two to five years, a significant number of financial firms already have concrete business use cases in place or planned within the next 12 months, indicating a sense of urgency.
The report further revealed that 37 per cent of financial firms opt for a multi-cloud strategy, surpassing hybrid (34 per cent), single (14 per cent), or private cloud (14 per cent) approaches. The decision to embrace multi-cloud is driven by the advantages of accessing the best individual solution providers, negotiating costs, and leveraging modular flexibility within data platform capabilities.
Multi-cloud adoption aligns with broader objectives of enhancing infrastructure reliability, achieving cost efficiency, ensuring interoperability, and meeting regulatory compliance requirements.
Additional findings from the report include:
- Financial firms adopt modern cloud data platforms (34 per cent) to benefit from enhanced data science capabilities, enabling better data outcomes, automation, and gaining a competitive edge in product development and applications.
- Cloud environments facilitate data sharing, collaboration among users (34 per cent), and the utilisation of cloud-enabled data marketplaces (12 per cent), enabling organisations to leverage query-ready data access and enrich internal data with external sources for improved analysis and insights.
- Data management alone consumes up to 40 per cent of organisations’ time, diverting financial firms’ efforts away from business innovation and decision-making. This results in increased costs and time spent on cloud data management.
- While technology teams (66.9 per cent) primarily drive cloud investments, the research indicates that other stakeholders, such as the line of business (15.4 per cent) and the centralised data office (16.1 per cent), are gaining influence in the decision-making process.
