Cloud-based banking ops with Finacle

What

Infosys Finacle is the flagship product from Indian IT giant Infosys catering to the end-to-end needs of banking customers. Finacle operates with banking clients across more than 100 countries, powering more than 110,000 bank branches and 1.7 billion accounts.

Why 

According to Rajashekara V. Maiya, VP and Head of Product Strategy at Infosys Finacle, a suite of variables have pushed banks and fintechs toward cloud-based operations. In particular, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant lockdowns forced banks to reconsider hosting their information on servers located on their premises. This tech was hard to physically access and maintain during lockdowns, forcing banks to quickly pivot to cloud services.

“Banks realize that they are good at manufacturing products,” Maiya said. “Managing the IT infrastructure networking data center on premise and implementing that is not their core competency.”

Banks also recognized the talent issues they faced. Top graduates are less interested in working at banks than they are at big tech companies and scrappier startups, Maiya argued. This complicates how quickly banks can keep up to date with the latest technology, including cybersecurity necessities. “It’s better to outsource it to somebody who's proficient in [cybersecurity],” he said.

How

Finacle encourages banks to treat cloud-related transitions as an opportunity to revamp DevOps practices and staffing writ large. Clients should implement a CICD (continuous integration and continuous development) process to ensure that their technology can be quickly upgraded as needed. Banks should also educate their staff on cloud-related practices, especially since they no longer have to manage on-premise databases or fine-tune application servers.

Banks should also expect new cybersecurity needs. While they have moved away from physical data storage, which mitigates many forms of in-person risk, they should continuously update how they operate with their cloud service provider as well as vendors.

“Staff is retained, reskilled, as well as rebadged, depending on whatever the client’s cloud service provider is offering,” Maiya added.

Banks may also find use in building out their partnerships teams, as cloud-based operations let banks expose the right set of APIs to facilitate scrappy fintechs and other partners building on top of banks’ ecosystems. Cloud-based sandbox environments let these stakeholders collaborate and experiment, offering innovative solutions at far faster speeds.

Finally, banks should expect the growing popularity of real-time payments. Cloud operations let banks rapidly scale the number of transactions using these networks; with industry-wide capacity, these payments rails may rapidly scale, presenting a new set of support and engineering demands.