IBM Cloud for Financial Services

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Balancing innovation, agility and regulatory responsibility

Financial Institutions in the United Kingdom have been at the forefront of digitalisation transformation, until now this has been primarily led by financial technology (FinTech) companies due to them being born on the cloud. Unencumbered by legacy systems and complex integrations has allowed them to innovate faster, innovating faster has allowed them to keep up with ever-increasing customer demand for new and innovative products & services.

This speed of innovation has increased competition as they offer a broader scope of services accompanied by non-traditional business models.

With traditional institutions advancing in their journey to cloud and the new FCA Cloud guidelines coupled with the rising regulatory pressure which is putting more focus on cybersecurity, guarding against and being able to react to breaches there has not been a more critical time for all financial institutions whether they are traditional established businesses or innovative FinTechs to be able to manage compliance and risk in the face of digital-everything allowing them to outpace and outsmart competitors in the delivery of services and products.

To achieve this success Financial Services Institutions, need to embrace the public cloud and the risk associated with it by establishing a secure framework.

A secure framework that until now has not existed. The IBM Public Cloud is already aligned to many government compliance programs. As well as the EU wide NIS security guidelines IBM created a first of a kind EBA Cloud Compliance Certificate. To enable FSS institutions to rapidly adopt and reap the benefits of Public Cloud IBM set out to enhance its already secure and enterprise ready cloud services.

Our clients wanted and needed more so working with our partners we created the IBM “financial services-ready” public cloud. The IBM “financial services-ready” public cloud manages your compliance and reduces risk by providing a framework designed in partnership with industry leaders Promontory to automate the application of controls your institution needs for regulatory compliance.

The first step was the creation of our IBM Cloud for VMware Regulated Workloads, the architecture was designed to deliver a secure and high performance platform. The solution is available today for our financial clients to accelerate their cloud journeys while balancing their risk and regulatory responsibilities.

Financial institutions (whether they are traditional established businesses or innovative FinTechs) and their 3rd party solution providers – ISVs and SaaS providers are faced with several challenges as they try to adopt the agility and resiliency of the public cloud.
The IBM “financial services-ready” public cloud has been designed to help the industry tackle compliance in a safe, secure, cost-effective, and responsible manner addressing the challenges in the move to the cloud. IBM’s FSS ready public cloud enables true KYOK and the highest possible security certification. For this reason, clients in the United Kingdom are engaging with IBM on the added advantages the FSS ready public cloud offers the financial services industry to migrate their sensitive operations to the public cloud.

Our clients are telling us it can take a minimum of 6 months to onboard a new cloud service provider, with the IBM “financial services-ready public cloud we can satisfy your risk and controls within weeks. Our unique dashboard and reporting enables a simple view of the enabled controls and provides evidence for your risk teams to evidence the controls are in place and being met.

The IBM “financial services-ready public cloud also expands the potential for innovation of products and services with competitive speed together with independent service vendors (ISVs), software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors, and FinTech companies themselves.

To find out more join us virtually at this must attend event on the 16th of September for our webinar “IBM Cloud for Financial Services: what does it mean for you” we will cover all sorts of topics from how to identify the right workloads to migrate first to the highest level of encryption available on the public cloud and keeping your own keys! Please click here to register your interest.