INFRASTRUCTURE
The year of the Cloud In a year defined by disruption, Cloud tech has proved its mettle as a vital tool for building resilient, responsive and scalable banking solutions. That’s certainly been the experience of Nigerian challenger Kuda Bank – one of 2020’s fintech success stories. It recently raised $10million in a seed funding round led by Target Global – said to be the largest of its kind in Africa – to build out its Cloud-native, branchless ‘bank of the free’. In a sign of the times, the deal was concluded via Zoom, the Cloud meetings app. Kuda launched in 2019 as Nigeria’s first full-stack, licensed, mobile-only bank, and has been hailed for ‘revolutionising’ financial services in a country where 40 per cent of the population is unbanked. Founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi says its Cloud-based tech stack is key to meeting the needs of its customers – both now and in the future. “It gives us an opportunity to build a different kind of stack,” he says. “To build for what we know the future will be. We can really tailor how we put together our technology to make it suit what we’re trying to achieve. At Kuda, we have our own core banking system, that
56
ThePaytechMagazine | Issue 7
Legacy or neo, the advantages of Cloud hosting became urgently obvious during 2020, as transaction volumes surged and banks were forced to rethink operating models. Ciaran Chu of ACI Worldwide and Babs Ogundeyi of Nigeria’s Kuda Bank discuss we’ve built in-house, so we own our own banking rails, and we’ve built different businesses around that. In the future, we’ll have an insurance platform, for instance, and other types of services. Using Cloud means all of these things can work independently of each other, so you don’t have to wait until everything is ready; you can just continue adding things and, if something doesn’t quite work out, you can remove it. Typically, that hasn’t really been the way things work.” “That’s really the power of the Cloud,” agrees Ciaran Chu, head of Cloud at
payment solutions provider ACI Worldwide. “It allows you to focus on better serving your customers and transforming your business model.” Powering $14trillion of payments for more than 6,000 organisations worldwide every day makes ACI Worldwide extremely well-placed to understand the challenges posed by legacy infrastructure and how Cloud can solve them. But, while ACI Worldwide provides payments services to global clients and Kuda builds its own Cloud bank for a much smaller target market, both Chu and Ogundeyi agree on the main advantages of the technology. Being able to innovate and deploy more products, faster, thanks to the Cloud, is something that can benefit all financial service providers. “Whether you’re a startup or an incumbent, I think the ultimate challenge comes back to the cost-to-income ratio,” says Chu, whose company serves 18 out of 20 of the world’s largest banks. “Historically, banks have relied very heavily on interest rates being very low, as well as transaction frees, to generate revenue and then, obviously, the cost base has been very linear,” he explains. “I think what Cloud has really www.fintechf.com