New IBM India platform empowering banks to brave Cloud journey

Banks know well that embracing the Cloud ecosystem can open the floodgates to innovations that can drive growth, increase efficiencies and more importantly, make the customers happier.

But the sensitivity of the data that they handle and the regulatory framework within which they must operate tend to sap their confidence.

However, IBM has a Cloud service precisely to address these concerns, two top executives of the company said.

"The world's first FSS (financial services sector) Cloud provided by IBM has all these capabilities -- with the clear intent to handle highly regulated workloads," Subram Natarajan, Chief Technology Officer, IBM India/South Asia, told IANS.

The IBM Cloud for Financial Services offering is designed to enable a transparent public Cloud ecosystem with the specific features for security, compliance and resiliency that financial institutions require.

IBM says that banks can confidently host their mission-critical applications in the Cloud and transact quickly and efficiently.

"As a strategy, banks may choose to move some of the infrastructure environments for a subset of applications, to the Cloud," Natarajan said.

"While banks can realise the cost benefits arising out of the 'pay as you use' models, especially for these workloads, it gives them a Hybrid Cloud environment to operate both from on-premise as well as on public Cloud, interchangeably," he added.

A Hybrid Cloud Platform will enable users to access more secure, resilient infrastructure to win in the agile, scale-driven as-a-service economy.

"Throughout the journey, moving the main production environments can occur in phases for a select set of applications. Of course, the nuances of this strategy may vary from one bank to another," Natarajan said.

According to a recent IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) survey, 80 per cent of Indian survey respondents trust their bank or other financial institutions to protect their personal information and data to a major extent.

Indeed, the research indicates that India's citizens and consumers trust their bank more than any other organisation or institution they interact with, including their employers -- 78 per cent; their government --76 per cent; and their healthcare providers --73 per cent.

Banks can realise the value of the data by suitably deriving the insights from the data and infusing the same into the digital journeys, or even use them for making business decisions.

"The need for every bank to become more and more 'data-driven' is evident," Natarajan said.

"Therefore, modernising the data platform, that allows the bank to collect data from various sources - inhouse and external, organizing it to make it meaningful, conducting analysis using Artificial Intelligence /Machine Learning methodologies to bring out insights and finally integrating them into the business processes, is the way to go," he added.

According to Arijit Bonnerjee, Director - Financial Services Sector, IBM India/ South Asia, IBM has been working with a lot of banks both globally and in India to help them adopt the next-generation business model which it calls "The Cognitive Enterprise".

"It starts with creating the right information architecture to leverage the power of data and then use Artificial Intelligence to make customer interactions more contextual, personalised, and instantly gratifying," he said.

IBM said its Hybrid Cloud platform generated more than $23 billion of revenue over the past 12 months.