The global banking landscape is changing, as fintechs, tech giants and even industries outside of banking look to carve out a slice of the pie. In fact, 60% of global banking executives see competition coming from new and unexpected places.
To compete, banks are introducing new infrastructure or experience led business models, enabled through Digital Transformation (DX) strategies. This is unlocking opportunities for banks to innovate value-added services and drive stronger engagement with their customers.
But for banks to do this at pace, while maintaining the safety and security that’s expected of them, the cloud needs to be central in their DX plans. It provides more agility, to enable faster innovation without compromising on bank grade security.
However, reaping these benefits will require collaboration and a different mindset, enabled by two key transitions.
1) From managing security to managing access
Cloud is a different paradigm for security, as it requires a mindset shift away from managing security to managing access. Rather than being responsible for creating and managing a network perimeter, which transfers predominantly to the cloud provider, banks will instead be mostly responsible for defining role-based access controls and ensuring strong authentication across users and applications.
By adopting a two-pronged approach in this way, banks have an opportunity to build a security framework that is more economic and secure than traditional on-premise infrastructure.
But to make this shift successfully, banks need to build strong, trusted relationships with their preferred cloud partners.
2) From holding data securely to unlocking data’s potential
By leveraging the privacy preserving techniques and robust security layers that collaborative cloud management offers, banks can find more freedom to use their data safely.
In making this shift, banks can focus on using data to innovate. With 82% of SMBs at least moderately interested in sharing their data with their financial provider, there’s a clear opportunity for banks to maximise customer data to create the new, personalised digital experiences their customers expect.
Creating a digital experience that’s enables customers to have a single view of their business and an end-to-end experience with the bank, will ultimately deepen the customer relationship and help banks compete with digital-first fintechs.
Find a smart partner that works with you, not against you
By collaborating with a smart partner to navigate these shifts, banks can focus on harnessing their competitive advantages – infrastructure, data and scale – to innovate like competitors and retain their security excellence.
By our Chief Information Security Officer, Jim Hart
