The financial services sector is often viewed as one of the most traditional industries. However, over the last few years, financial services firms have made notable strides in embracing digital transformation. Many are investing in technologies to deliver the best possible experiences to today’s increasingly digital-first customers.
In the Middle East and Africa, the banking and finance industry’s spending on information and communications technology (ICT) is expected to reach $15.24 billion by 2023, according to IDC. The global analyst firm also pointed out that financial institutions are increasingly embracing advanced technologies to streamline operations, cut costs, and maximise efficiencies.
“By leveraging cloud technologies, financial firms have the opportunity to drive business growth by being better positioned to anticipate change, double down on innovation and experimentation, and build and scale new solutions faster at lower costs,” explains Lynne Zeldenryk, EMEA Financial Services Lead, AWS.
“We’re seeing financial services organisations modernise and transform their offerings to meet and exceed customer expectations,” says Zeldenryk. “Access to technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, APIs, microservices, and data lakes can enable customers to speed product design and time to market, help make better decisions around customer segmentation, pricing, product development, and cross-selling to better serve their customers.”
Financial institutions in the Middle East are already using advanced technologies to deliver better services. Emirates NBD turned to AWS to build a personalised retail banking experience using Amazon Personalize. Another example is First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) who is using AWS Outposts for development, testing, and production workloads – a move that accelerated its digital transformation in the cloud and on-premises, resulting in 50 percent improved time-to-market.
Unlocking the value of data
According to IDC, 87 percent of chief data officers across the financial services industry cite difficulty with data availability, accessibility and quality in their organisation.
Zelenryk explains that the cloud empowers financial institutions to manage, analyse, and use machine learning on large and real-time data sets to pave way for a more efficient decision-making.
“Finding, acquiring, and evaluating a seemingly endless array of data effectively requires analytics tools and resources that many organisations cannot afford or accommodate, or that were built to run on a single computer,” says Zeldenryk. “Existing tools were not designed to take advantage of the cloud’s scale and connectivity to enable large scale analytics on-demand. Historically this has meant organisations missing opportunities to capitalise on data-led decisions.”
Meeting regulatory requirements
As one of the most regulated industries, financial services firms need to abide by stringent requirements and industry policies, but that should not be a barrier to innovation and digital transformation. Zelenryk explains that AWS works with customers to help them meet their regulatory and compliance requirements. The company has a team of security and compliance experts that help customers to create a scalable, secure cloud environment specially designed to correspond to an organisation’s risk appetite, security goals, strategies, and tactics while meeting the strictest regulatory requirements.
Continuous reinvention
It is undeniable that the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the ‘digital imperative’ for financial organisations with no turning back to pre-pandemic norms.
Zeldenryk says, “Financial institutions can continue taking advantage of the momentum to reinvent themselves, re-imagine business and customer value, streamline their processes, and become increasingly resilient,”
She points out that companies that were using cloud technology and services pre-pandemic have been the most agile over the last year. Cloud-based architectures allowed them to experiment, learn, and iterate on new digital services and processes quickly.
“It’s tempting to look at accomplishments and declare that transformation work is done. However, achieving meaningful, sustained change requires building the right culture and leveraging technology to enable reinvention every day,” adds Zeldenryk.
