Open banking and the cloud
There is great interest in open banking. A Google search shows over 700 million hits, so there’s certainly no lack of opinion on the subject. Although progress towards operational open banking has been slower than many predicted, our view is that this delay is largely due to the magnitude of change required by some banks to migrate to an open banking environment. Most banks are extremely complex organisations. Any transformational change project must therefore guarantee the bank’s reputation and operational efficiency. The adoption of open banking requires fresh thinking, new technologies and agile working methods. But above all, it requires careful planning and consideration to ensure that the deployment of APIs – whether open or internal – is fully aligned with the business goals of the bank.
GFT has participated in the open banking debate since its inception. We believe this is the most transformational banking initiative in decades and there are competitive advantages for early adopters. We have helped several clients adopt technical solutions that enable them to participate in open banking easily and profitably. In our experience it is clear that cloud is a keystone of the strategic digital business platform that banks are starting to put in place. Such a platform requires enormous computing power and flexibility, which we believe is best achieved in a cloud environment. Only cloud can offer the scale, elasticity and flexibility necessary to move open banking from theory into practice.
Although much of the open banking debate – and regulation – has focused on demand factors, such as delivering new services that delight customers, we believe that open banking is at least as much about supply side factors. In practice open banking is about bank transformation and end-to-end digitalisation.
In our latest Point of View paper, we examine open banking as a catalyst of banking transformation and show the pivotal role of cloud technology in making this happen. But as an advanced partner of Amazon Web Services (AWS) we are also delighted to be able to offer an expedited journey to the cloud using our open API framework.
The open API framework is the result of our close partnership with AWS and is built in light of our joint expertise in banking and cloud technology. The outcome of our collaboration is a practical framework that delivers open banking in weeks rather than months while offering the best security and data governance standards available. Open banking is more of a journey than a destination and our open API framework offers a fast track to bank transformation.
We hope you find our paper interesting and insightful and that it encourages you to discuss your open banking plans with us.
