Gartner Says Cloud Banking Can Drive 'Creative Destruction' in the Banking Industry

A rapid shift in attitude towards cloud banking is happening within the financial services industry, according to Gartner. 


A Gartner survey found that cloud is the top priority for global financial services CIOs and that 39 percent of those surveyed expect that more than half of all their transactions will be supported via cloud infrastructure and software as a service (SaaS) by 2015.


In Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), 44 percent of FS CIOs expect that more than half of all their institutions' transactions will be supported via cloud infrastructure by 2015 and 33 percent of them expect that the majority of transactions will be processed via SaaS by 2015. Gartner Says Cloud Banking Can Drive 'Creative Destruction' in the Banking Industry:


“Early cloud adoption, especially in the FS sectors, may have been limited to non-core areas and proofs of concept, but it is set to go mainstream, moving the heart of the business, transaction origination and processing, into the cloud,” said Peter Redshaw, managing vice president at Gartner. “Cloud banking should be innovative, dedicated to this industry and transformative.”



As with most cloud initiatives, cloud banking might be disruptive. It can provide the ability for attackers or defenders to try completely new services and processes, such as reverse auctions and third-party core banking systems, for example. 


Successful new cloud services can displace the existing and dominant process for design, distribution or transacting in a disruptive way, rather than just incrementally improving them, says Redshaw. 

As banks progressively replace people in the value chain with algorithmic operations (AOs) to run processes and make decisions, their intellectual property increasingly resides in these algorithms. The value of people is not in running operations but in improving the AOs, Redshaw argues. 


At a more prosaic level, cloud banking should lessen investment in bank data centers. Data center investments affected