Finextra spoke to president of product and chief operating officer, Prema Varadhan, and CVP of financial services at Microsoft, Bill Borden, on the adoption of cloud and Software-as-a-Service during the Temenos Community Forum in Vienna earlier this year.
With an upsurge in the adoption of cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), banks are approaching growth differently. Borden explained that cloud technology has shown where banks can take advantage of scale while not having to build on-premise technology on their own, giving them more space for agility and flexibility while adhering to regulatory-controlled environments.
Varadhan furthered: “Banks want to offer hyper-personalisation using data and AI. The on-prem technologies are not naturally suited, though you can achieve some (but not all) of it at scale. Cloud technologies naturally lend to data-driven, AI-driven capabilities that you can build very quickly with agility.”
Remarking that cloud technology can aid financial institutions in meeting ESG goals, Varadhan stated that it starts with small operating processes within the company’s ecosystem and builds up to how they operate with clients, partners, and how they build solutions. She explained that by holding yourself responsible for being sustainable, you are also bringing your community along with you on the path toward being responsible.
“Banks that consume our solutions on the cloud are already seeing carbon emissions on their side dramatically reduce by 90% or 93% in some cases. It's massive. We have to keep demonstrating that we walk the talk, and then you start bringing about change in your community,” Varadhan noted.
Borden added: “We are very excited about the capabilities that cloud can offer banks in bringing transparency and concentration of data intelligence around understanding data, so banks can understand their impact on their carbon footprint. With that data, banks can understand how they can apply it all the way through the value chain, from how they offer it to their customers to products and services.”
“They are also creating products for their customers to create green financing; creating accounts where consumers can actually track their carbon footprint based on the investments that they are making. The idea of using it internally to run their businesses in a sustainable fashion and creating products and services for their customers is taking off, and the cloud allows them to do it at a scale and deliver quickly.”
Both Varadhan and Borden recognize that the partnership between Temenos and Microsoft allows the companies to offer the most composable capabilities and drive their products to market at a higher speed and faster time to value. The goal for both platforms is to achieve scale on SaaS platforms, and their partnership guarantees that development.