The UK financial sector is the latest industry to be facing a Brexit challenge as EU negotiators feel that the recently proposed plans would prevent the bloc from being able to make autonomous decisions. The uncertainty caused by Brexit and increasing geopolitical tensions has led industry experts to suggest that times of volatility and minimal growth lie ahead for the global financial market.

As such, the majority of profit drivers for businesses now stem from improving existing services, customers’ quality of experience and operational efficiency. One way to enhance their performance is for organisations to adopt new technologies and evolve their IT infrastructure.

Having seen the initial impacts of blockchain and artificial intelligence on the financial sector, it’s clear that businesses in this industry are no strangers to digital disruption, but we’re approaching a situation where modernisation and innovation are prioritised and viewed as enablers in terms of decision making and enhancing customer services.

Every cloud has a silver lining

The finance sector is a highly regulated industry, which of course prioritises security, but also speed and efficiency. By migrating to the cloud, finance organisations can lower costs, leverage the ability to flexibly scale as required to meet customer demand, and avoid vendor lock-in with the use of platform and container technology. 

A recent study from GFT highlights not only the industry’s excitement around cloud computing’s offerings but also how the development of cloud technology will introduce new applications, citing that three-quarters of investment banks are more excited by cloud computing’s ability to provide agility and resource elasticity into their businesses than its ability to simply deliver cost reductions. Innovations in cloud offerings have already led to enhancements to the customer experience and open banking, with banks levelling the playing field by opening up their systems with APIs to allow authorised access into their banking services, ushering in new era of disaggregated banking functions.

Cloudy with a chance of disruption

For financial organisations to compete in a world of digital disruptions, they must be able to offer secure solutions that meet customer expectations of personalised services and deliver connected financial service offerings.

However, when leveraging the cloud for agility and cost reduction, businesses must also consider the associated increased network demand to connect to the cloud resources and connect the hybrid cloud environments together. With traffic that can surge in a day and the continuous threat to system security, a reliable and efficient network is a business essential.

Financial services rely upon real-time decision making and state-of-the-art customer services and experiences to excel in their markets. With the onset of open banking and other applications, there's a critical need for a solution that increases reliability and agility and ensures financial organisations are able to keep up with market demand and expectations.  

By implementing network optimisation solutions and strategies, financial institutions can not only deliver greater performance and better outcomes to their customers, they can establish a future-proofed network ecosystem that will scale to effectively manage growing demands against the backdrop of an uncertain future market, whilst creating a lasting advantage over competitors to ensure future profitability.