How does onboarding to the cloud environment benefit FinTech companies?
The FinTech industry is dynamic and fast-paced. With technology advancement at its core, cloud computing has played a pivotal role in the process. The industry, as such, is under constant regulatory risk which is complex and evolving. A competitive market which has numerous players offering specialised services, managing low unit economics even with a higher user base in India and concerns of data security, cloud computing offers a comprehensive solution for FinTech firms to achieve faster Time to Market (TTM), able to comply with regulatory’ needs, support to scale infrastructure based on the organisation’s needs, and also provide FinTech much needed controls to ensure a secure Information Technology (IT) infrastructure.
How have cloud technologies enabled financial businesses to reduce their TTM for new products and services?
The biggest benefits FinTech companies have over traditional banks is the speed of execution, ease to onboard customer and ability to release new services at speed. However, this would not have been possible had they not embraced cloud technologies. A number of FinTech companies are adopting Machine Learning (ML) to utilise Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to extract text and data from Know Your Customer (KYC) documents, building a Video KYC, which helps in easing the customer onboarding, building specialised credit underwriting model using ML, which helps in accelerating loan disbursement, to name a few.
Security is often a major concern for financial organisations. How do cloud technologies address these challenges effectively?
Cloud technologies play a great role in addressing the security concerns of FinTech firms; be it by providing the proper governance with right access to the right roles with the help of Identity Access Management (IAM), providing increased security with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), providing comprehensive details of resources access with the logging and audit trail mechanism, and also help in encrypting the data both during the transit or at the rest.
Moreover, security is a shared responsibility. With all the large cloud providers responsible for the underlying network and infrastructure, customers remain responsible for their access policies and data they deploy on cloud.
Furthermore, it is easy for FinTech firms to comply with the local regulators’ requirements like the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) as these provide tools to meet compliance and reporting requirements.
Cost optimisation is critical in the financial sector. In what ways can a cloud partner ecosystem help financial organisations manage and reduce operational costs?
Cost is an important factor, especially for FinTech firms supporting Indian market. While the basic fundamental of all cloud providers is providing “Pay As You Go” for any services consumed on cloud, organisations still fail to adopt the best practices to maintain the hygiene and cost effectiveness of their IT Infrastructure. Cloud partners like Ankercloud are positioned to help FinTech companies in ensuring their IT infrastructure is cost-optimised. Whether it is about identifying the right compute workloads that offer the best price/performance ratio based on an organisation’s specific needs, ensuring workloads are optimally utilised rather than over- or under-utilised, leveraging the cloud’s scale-in/scale-out feature, or selecting the appropriate storage configuration based on organisational requirements, all these factors play a crucial role in efficient cloud management.
While these are the technology levers, there are other commercial levers like Savings Plan and Reserve Instances in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure or Committed Usage Discounts (CUDs) in Google Cloud platform, which help in optimising infrastructure cost. Above this, an organisation can also go for usage-based commitment model, where the size and duration of the commitment influence the amount of discount offered.
Ankercloud, with its managed services offering, is well equipped to support FinTech companies in optimising their cloud spend.
What unique value propositions can cloud partners bring to help FinTech businesses stand out?
Cloud partners like Ankercloud can guide FinTech companies with the right path to cloud journey – be it in terms of helping to optimise their IT Infrastructure, implementing the right security controls and supporting in adopting new features with the best practices in a timely manner.
For cloud optimisation, Ankercloud, with its managed service offering, studies the customers’ cloud environment, prepares a blueprint of overall architecture, deploys monitoring agents in customer cloud environments to enable monitoring and continuously monitor the platform on a real-time basis.
Security components for cloud can be classified into either native cloud components and third-party security tools. Ankercloud can assist in enabling the right native cloud component tool and suggest the right third-party tools for security monitoring like IAM, MFA, encryption, Virtual Private Network (VPN), Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), data encryption, etc.
With the advent of new services offering from Hyperscalers, partners like Ankercloud can help in easing to identify the right use case, doing a cost value analysis, suggesting the right services to be used and also help in implementing in customers’ environment.
For FinTech startups that primarily focus on business ideas, how can cloud partners support those in bridging the technology gap?
Cloud partner will be the technology partner, if used effectively, as cloud partners are more closely associated with Hyperscalers. For FinTech firms that are on the path to scale and support their customers with the latest cloud technologies, cloud partners like Ankercloud can be technology partner in their success; be it in terms of suggesting the right cloud, helping with implementing the best practices, or supporting in terms of overcoming the regulatory requirements.
What role do cloud ecosystems play in making Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) solutions more accessible and scalable for FinTech organisations?
FinTech organisations leveraging cloud-based AI/ML and Generative AI solutions are able to innovate their services, provide better customer experience and transform their organisations faster than ever before—be it building AI models for fraud detection based on real-time data streaming, creating a credit risk model to help improve the loan process in minutes or developing algorithmic trading models to help take trade positions based on market trends or building a personalised recommendation engine to help FinTech customers make right financial choices.
Cloud ecosystem empowers FinTech organisations by making AI/ML solutions easily accessible, because of accessibility and democratisation of AI, with easily available pre-build AI/ML services like AWS SageMaker, Google Cloud Vertex AI and Azure ML models. Cloud provides the benefits of scalability and elasticity which help in avoiding high upfront infrastructure cost and enable easy scalability. Data being the backbone for AI/ML solution, cloud provides data lake and warehouse solutions like AWS Lake Formation and Google BigQuery, which help in consolidating unlimited structured and unstructured data for AI-driven analytics. For the AI/ML models, development, training, deployment and continuous model improvement, cloud is the ideal choice. Cloud also provides ease of collaboration and market-place access, be it integrating the AI/ML solution with third-party providers, leveraging open banking Application Programming Interface (API) or any fraud detection tools. Cloud also enables access to a vast number of AI models via the cloud marketplace, which speeds the innovation.
We, at Ankercloud, through our strong AI/ML and Data practice, help FinTech harness the power of cloud in building cost-effective and scalable solutions. We’ve helped companies set up large and robust Data Lake to support AI/ML models, build AI-powered recommendation engines to personalise financial services and develop fraud-detection models that process real-time transactions efficiently. Whether it’s improving risk assessment, optimising trading strategies, or enhancing customer engagement, we enable businesses to move faster and stay ahead of the competition.
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