ACI WORLDWIDE: CLOUD
A funny thing happened on the way to the Cloud “Everybody talks about payments moving towards the Cloud – that it’s going to be this $300billion market opportunity in the next five years,” says Ciaran Chu. “A lot of banks say they are committed to the technology, but if you look at the actual workloads being run there, from a payments perspective, a lot of them are still in their infancy.”
ACI Worldwide’s Head of Public Cloud, Ciaran Chu, says it isn’t just a technology solution – it’s an opportunity to fundamentally reshape banks’ business models
As head of public Cloud services at payment solutions provider ACI Worldwide, Chu is involved in the digital transformation journey of many of the 6,000 organisations that it works with, including 18 of the 20 biggest banks globally. And while some may be slower than others, for those who ‘get’ Cloud’s full potential, he believes it can radically change the way they operate as well as their future profitability. And it all comes back to payments…
they’re able to charge less fees and interest rates are at an all-time low. They’re the two traditional revenue streams. Where you’ll see an acceleration of Cloud technology, is through artificial intelligence (AI) or other data aggregation services, that allow them to create alternative, new value streams that they wouldn’t be able to create today in an on-premise environment. Those that are going to be really successful will move components, one by one, to arrive at value, assimilate the learnings and work in a truly agile manner. Ultimately, they’ll be able to unlock that value and transform the business, piece by piece, so that they’re diversifying their revenue, changing their cost base and, ultimately, spending more time on the consumers and less time on the maintenance. A lot of banks and intermediaries I speak
FINTECH FINANCE: Can you give us a scene-setter – where banks are now and where they are heading to in their Cloud journey? CIARAN CHU: I think the big challenge that a lot of banks are going to have in the next three to five years is that their traditional business model is under attack: www.sibos.com
to, be they merchants or processors, are saying: “I want to have a faster speed to market. I acknowledge there may be more upfront cost involved in that because I’m running two platforms – I’m not fully optimised when I’m deploying it in the Cloud – but, ultimately, my major driver is to get faster time to market and increase my agility. By doing that, my expectation is that I'll get new revenue streams that I wouldn’t have got otherwise in the short term. In the long term, much as I’ve done in an on-premise environment, I’m going to optimise my workloads as much as possible, to ensure that my cost comes down.” FF: You talk about banks finding new business models and revenue streams, but where do they look? CC: The most logical place for neo and traditional banks to find revenue outside of transaction fees – with the caveat that, while revenue fees per transaction are falling, the volume of electronic payments, especially off the back of COVID, is rising – is through improved customer experience. The easiest way to do that is by improving transaction convergence or giving customers more contextual data to go about their daily lives.
FintechFinancePresents
2020 Special
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