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@BryanClagett:

I thought "banks want to be tech companies". By pushing towards cloud services, won't they push back to being banks?:)

@MelvinHaskins: 

"outside of the USA" - what is there? You mean there are actually other countries outside the USA?? Jokes apart, I thought Citi is quite popular in UK / EU.

@StephanKotze:

IMO, the challenge is slightly different. The principles (i.e. PaaS / SaaS product vendors) are the ones creating the excessive hype. If implementation partners - who are agents of the principles - try to inject a dose of reality into customers, they'd be ones risking rejection by customers drunk on the Kool-Aid supplied by the principles.

@StephanKotze:

That's precisely my point.

Not referring to present company but many cloud enthusiasts do seem to be peddling snake oil. Let me copy / paste the relevant passage from my aforementioned blog post to explain why I say this:

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#5. Excessive Hype

Hype is no stranger to the IT industry. However, in the case of SMAC architecture, it’s gone a bit too far and is causing a lot of operational chaos.

I got a glimpse of this when I recently visited a healthcare center in my neighborhood. I was asked to fill a registration form. I told the receptionist that I’d already registered with them during my previous visit. He told me that they’d lost all customer data when their server crashed two months before without any backups. But he assured me that they won’t have any problem from now onwards because they’d “shifted everything the cloud”. Obviously, he assumed that the cloud service provider would take care of backups and make the data available 24/7/364.

Big mistake.

View image on Twitter FollowGTM360 @GTM360

If ever you forgot it's *your* job to backup your cloud data, @HostGator will remind you.

I hope the CIO of this company knows better. But I strongly doubt it. Because it’s not just this random healthcare center.

Australian ATM networks recently went down because their cloud service provider suffered an outage. According to Finextra, there was no backup. Apparently, the leading banks to whom the ATM network belonged thought it was the responsibility of the cloud service provider to take the backup. And the cloud service provider countered by saying the banks’ hosting plan didn’t include a backup.

When such things happen even to seasoned technology users like banks, you know that the “cloud gets rid of all infrastructure worries” hype has gone a bit too far.

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Based on my background of working in the IT industry for years, during which period I have been a supplier of technology to banks and of marketing solutions to fintechs and banks: 

• With so much of fintechs' offerings running on banking rails, it's silly for them to claim to be disruptors of banks. Ergo, even I don't like the word "disruptor"! 
• I agree that fintechs should have a tech cofounder. But I also know that it's extremely hard to find one, especially if the original founders come from sales / marketing backgrounds. Right or wrong, techies don't like to join sales / marketing founders. They understand the importance of these business functions only when they have founded a company and struggled owing to lack of sales / marketing.
• While I agree that fintechs shouldn't reinvent the wheel, they should be sensitive to the risks of partnering with third parties. I've covered this in a blog post entitled Thriving On Chaos Of SMAC Architecture on my company blog.
• I totally disagree that banks have not harnessed the power of technology. On the contrary, I think banks have made pathbreaking use of technology to reduce costs, increase profits and enhance CX. Credit Card, ATM, MBS, CDO, CDS, and Algo Trading stand testimony. How many other industries have created the equivalent of technology-driven products like CDO and CDS, or technology-driven business models like algo trading that expose limitations even with the speed of light?

More than anything else, for fintechs to become powerhouses, they need to create products and services that people really need / want. On that count, I'm gung-ho about Online P2P Lenders and Robo Advisors and skeptical about neobanks that offer yet another bank account / debit card.

PSD2 is meaningless without banks. Who is PSD2 telling to open up their customer data?  

Fiserv launched ZashPay / PopMoney, which allowed people to make payments basis email or mobile phone number. This happened 7 years ago. Fiserv unveils P2P payments service. Why is so hard to believe 2 yearsago that you could make payments without knowing the beneficiary's bank account number? 

@StephanKotze:

I agree but with onprem, customers are conditioned to budget separately for backup, uptime, and so on. With cloud, there's so much hype that cloud relieves customer of backup, and other infra hassles etc. that customers are lulled into a false sense of belief that cloud automatically means backup, etc. Hence the need to specifically reiterate this only for cloud. And to highlight that, when these costs are loaded up, cloud TCO can exceed onprem TCO in a hurry.

All technically valid points but things can take on a different color when the commercial angle is introduced. That's because, just because cloud can automate backup does not mean that it will - most entry-level cloud plans don't include backup. If you want backup, you need to pay more. There are many more gotchas like that w.r.t. security, uptime, etc. I've covered them on the post entitled Thriving On Chaos Of SMAC Architecture on my company blog. As Gartner Research Director Yvette Cameron noted, SaaS deployments may require more resources than onprem deployments.   

When all these hidden costs are loaded, cloud can get quite expensive, as we've observed in many real-life migration proposals.

I didn't think chatbots will replace humans in customer service jobs this soon when I wrote Can Chatbots Replace Humans?.

Car retailing is a very different business compared to banking. I'm keen on seeing where this goes.