THE CLOUD: US BANKING
Unlocking the future
America’s KeyBank had already begun its journey to the Cloud when the pandemic struck. Here, its Head of Digital for Commercial Banking, Jonas Ng, explains how the technology not only rose to the crisis, but has given the bank a head start in a vastly-changed landscape For a nation at the heart of so much of the world’s technology revolution, the enduring love so many Americans have for cash, cheques and plastic cards has been a puzzling paradox.
But there’s now abundant evidence that, with physical restrictions forced on societies by the COVID-19 pandemic, their affection for traditional forms of payment is being replaced. A recent US survey by respected market watchers McKinsey found that four-outof-five Americans made some form of digital payment in 2021. But that’s just part of a change in consumer behaviours that’s driving banks in the States to adopt a new infrastructure. Lockdowns have supercharged a wider dash to digital by organisations, including banks, that previously heavily relied on face-to-face business; and they have had to bring their customers – many of whom had been kicking and screaming against it for years – with them. COVID has been the accelerator for many financial institutions to tear up traditional banking rule books and enlist the help of third-party, Cloud-based providers to implement the transition to a new digital way of working. One such organisation is KeyBank, which, with $181billion in assets, a $3.5billion annual revenue, 17,000 full-time equivalent employees and 1,000 branches across 15 states, sits at around number 20 in the league table of US banking institutions. ffnews.com
With a history that can be traced back to 1825, tradition runs deep in the DNA of the Cleveland, Ohio-based bank. However, as Jonas Ng, its head of digital for commercial banking, explains, its pre-pandemic decision to begin moving to a Cloud environment, enabled it to quickly scale up its digital offering to meet demand when the pandemic forced it to temporarily shutter its counters. “Cloud was the right place for us to be, at the right time,” recalls Ng. “There was this sea change in the way that customers were interacting with their banks, adopting these new channels. “The sheer volume of new users on all of our digital assets and digital properties meant we had to scale up very quickly.
We have an almost immeasurable amount of data. But with big data comes really big challenges. It’s a monster to try and get your arms around, to manage the data ecosystem And these were customers who had been resisting those channels for years, even though we had enabled online, mobile and phone banking decades ago.” Ng, who was working with Cloud technology in the early days of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft
Azure, recalls how the focus, back then, was on the speed of software development that Cloud enabled – before the penny dropped that what Cloud services were really about was business growth at lower cost. Describing that moment of realisation, he says: “We were playing around with Cloud computing and platform-as-a-service at the business I was with at the time, just to see if it would make us faster with our software delivery and development methodologies. We were really trying to get to weekly, if not daily, sprints and releases, and we thought Cloud could help us. “But the reality is that Cloud computing is about efficiency. It’s about scale. Issue 22 | TheFintechMagazine
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