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Goldman mulls industry-specific financial cloud

Goldman Sachs is weighing the potential to build an external cloud platform for use by other financial institutions, according to a memo seen by Yahoo Finance.

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Goldman mulls industry-specific financial cloud

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

The memo, written by co-chief information officer Marco Argenti - himself hired from AWS in September last year - evokes the emergence of a vertical cloud platform built specifically with the financial services industry in mind, as opposed than the generic cloud offerings presented by AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

"In the same way Amazon Web Services (AWS) was conceived, both as an internal product to streamline Amazon.com's operations and as an external product to offer the same benefits to any company facing similar issues, our core technology services can be externalised to other financial institutions,” the memo states.

AWS has become a revenue-generating juggernaut for Amazon, which posted $10 billion in turnover from cloud computing in its last quarter alone.

To match that level of success, Goldman will need to nurture the confidence of the developer community, says Argenti.

“Developer adoption is a key driver of the adoption of our financial cloud, the same way developers determined the success of public clouds," he writes. "Developers influence purchasing decisions, and the ease of use of developer products determines the velocity at which applications are developed and can drive consumption."

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Comments: (2)

Andrew Smith

Andrew Smith Founding CTO at RTGS & ClearBank

The investment required to make this a reality is something that simply you couldnt get a return on.

The developer community expect certain tools and capabilities, and the specifics for financial institutions are pretty much all covered off now by the big two providers. The fact we have entire cloud native banks shows that there is nothing the "generic" cloud cannot do to cover off a specific cloud vertical for financial services.

In addition, the investment to get such a solution up and running just cannot be justified. Billions is spent per quarter on Cloud by Microsoft, which can only be justified by the number of use cases it caters for and the breadth of verticals it supplies. A single vertical simply doesnt make economic sense....

This feels to me like a technologist solving a problem that doesnt really exist and is care free to the economics behind the solution they are proposing. 

A Finextra member 

Someone looking to make a name for themselves....Show some "non banking" type thinking

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