Cloud is the obvious choice for financial services

Live from Google Cloud Summit, São Paulo, Brazil

Half a world away from Norway, I’m currently in sunny, warm Brazil. I came here to both attend and speak at the Google Cloud Summit in São Paulo and to be part of Innovation Norway’s Brazil Week.  

Brazil and in fact, much of Latin America, is a very interesting market for us. Brazil is ripe for better payment solutions and the only way forward is mobile. Half the population own smartphones. The challenge of financial inclusion can be solved with our technology.

This year’s summit, as it does every year, brought together Google cloud partners, IT professionals, executives, Google engineers and customers to discuss the future of the cloud. I was privileged to be invited to present at the Leaders Circle which is a private event for around 200 c-level executives from Latin America.

I took the opportunity to present the case study of Auka to illustrate that financial services run on the public cloud isn’t a problem – we paved the way. Now that Google has launched data centres in Brazil, not starting from or moving to the cloud doesn’t make sense. Especially if you are in financial services. We have said it before, but I’ll say it again: there is no safer place for your data.

Let me briefly explain why

Firstly, the economic savings are huge – even if you’re a large-scale operation. Look at Spotify, for example. They could probably get storage marginally cheaper if you simply measured by megabyte or CPU cycles on the cloud vs. their own infrastructure, granted. But, Google is constantly updating and providing new services on the cloud platform – it’s impossible for a sole firm to compete. Further, in terms of scale – both up and down – and Google’s huge innovation catalogue, choosing to go it alone will simply impose a large disadvantage and cost.

In the financial services industry, particularly, there is a real lack of customer focused development. The issues customers are facing will only grow and the old way of thinking about product development in banks, paired with the hurdles of legacy IT systems makes it hard for banks to adapt to meet or solve future problems. The cloud and its current and future tech can, though.

So in fact, it’s mostly a mindset challenge for many in accepting that the cloud is safe. The technology available there is superior and must be utilised in the quest to solve real problems for real people. If a bank, for example, are just selling what their competitor is selling –  commodity financial service – that’s fine and well. But then there is a need to be the leanest machine, as at the end it’s all about cost – and legacy IT is expensive.  

Google has the toolbox and it keeps adding to it to ensure you’ve always got the best equipment at hand, when you need it. It is secure, reliable and proven to work for complex financial services of the future. The real question now is: what will you build with it?

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