Native or migrant? Multi, hybrid, public or private? Whatever the mix, whatever the journey, cloud technology is, said Luca Piezzo, Head of Cloud Center of Excellence at Banca Ifis, ‘the new normal’ for many banks. It is not always a comfortable normal, however, and some expensive lessons have been – and continue to be – learned. And already another ‘normal’ is being shaped, that of cloud composable architecture, with applications ‘composed’ into re-usable microservices that can connect with other microservices and systems to develop flexibility, cost-efficiency and rapid scaling capabilities.
For every one-point improvement in customer experience scores, banks can expect to make a return of $8 per customer per year. But keeping pace with rapidly evolving customer needs and requirements is simply not possible with monolithic and siloed architecture.
The business case for a move towards a composable architecture housed in the cloud is clear, but the transformation journey is not easy, and requires careful management.
of CIOs report that modernisation has not led to expected LEVELS OF BUSINESS BENEFIT1
Both Mark Whale, Partner at FICO and Ange Johnson de Wet, NatWest’s Head of Engineering are agreed that culture is the place to start, and that this is a journey which requires careful management of all stakeholders.
‘A once-a-month sit down with the finance business partner and CIO is going to be nowhere near sufficient,’ cautions Ange Johnson de Wet of NatWest. ‘You need everyone involved and a full culture transformation.’
This full cultural transformation requires a break from traditional siloed thinking: business leaders, technologists, and analysts must be able to operate as teams across the whole customer lifecycle to achieve, and reap the benefits of, true composability.
Culture is also key to success because cloud requires new ways of working. At JP Morgan Chase, which has just moved its 1,000th application into a public cloud, there’s a knowledge transfer underway to help people in the business develop their own cloud skills.
With time and proper management, the business benefits are undeniable, noted Marco Eijsackers, Head of CIO Office at ING. He said that ING, now in the next phase of its cloud journey, is seeing the time to develop new propositions drop from 50 days to 10 days. ‘Because we’ve put in the hard work, it has made things easier for our developers,’ he said.
NatWest has enjoyed similar benefits, with de Wet pointing out that: ‘The engineer experience is much better and you can scale much better.’
DROP in time-to-market enabled by composable architecture
There may be no quick wins, but it is clear that the long-term gains in speed, agility and resilience will MAKE THIS TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY A NECCESSITY.
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