Financial Services Companies Rapidly Adopting Cloud
Implications of Google Cloud acquiring Cornerstone technology
On Feb 19th, Google Cloud announced it has acquired cornerstone technology, a company that specializes in helping enterprises migrate their legacy workloads from mainframes to public clouds. While the acquisition news was all over the web highlighting Google Cloud’s push into enterprise hybrid cloud market, we cannot stop thinking another less-discussed implication of the deal: “financial services companies are aggressively adopting the cloud model.”
Today, the mainframe’s largest end-users are financial services companies that require robust reliability and availability. Cornerstone’s major customers are also European banks and insurers such as Postbank and ING. We think the trend of financial services embracing digital disruption is just getting started. Meanwhile, cloud providers are increasingly putting more resources to design new computing architecture for the financial services vertical. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has emphasized the financial sector as a key vertical for GCP to gain market share in an interview at Goldman Sachs conference:
"I'll just use financial service as an example. The CIO has a certain budget, but many of the programs are -- the program budgets are controlled in retail banking by the Head of Consumer, Head of Institutional, Head of Risk, et cetera. And so when we build these industry-specific solutions, they're highly differentiated. No one has that capability, and that allows us to sell, not just in IT, but to the business owners."
Datadog report: serverless in financial services
On Feb 11th, cloud monitoring company Datadog published a report on AWS Lambda, the cloud giant's serverless computing platform, finding Lambda has gained growing popularity among developers. The report claims that “nearly half of Datadog customers that use Amazon Web Services have now adopted Lambda, serverless functions are now in widespread use across a variety of companies with an infrastructure footprint in AWS.”
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Interestingly, one of the industries quickly adopting serverless compute is financial service. The noted benefits of using serverless compute include less or no infrastructure management, transparent scaling, and cost efficiency (never pay for idle). AWS has used Vanguard as a key example in AWS Reinvent 2019 to promote its Lambda services. Other financial companies such as BBVA, Capital One, and HSBC are also adopting serverless compute for a variety of applications. We summarize some interesting use cases below for our readers to understand serverless compute in the financial industry better.
Jeff Dowds of Vanguard talks about the journey to the AWS cloud
BBVA: Economics of Serverless
HSBC: Uses serverless to process millions of transactions in real-time
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