The intelligent cloud and financial services: an overview

Getting cloud ready is an important first step toward the future of financial services. Not only can your business operations become smoother, thanks to scalable storage and connected devices, you can also serve your customers in a better, more secure and more convenient way. So without further ado, here’s how the intelligent cloud can benefit financial services.

Security

88 percent of consumers trust that their payment network is arming them with new, secure technologies that protect them from fraud.

You have a responsibility, and an expectation, to keep your customers and their money safe from fraud and security breaches. By adopting modern cloud solutions, your business is able to implement tighter security measures, such as:

  • Access control that allows you to dictate who in your business is allowed to see particularly sensitive data. This will ensure that your valuable customer bank details and personal information will never be viewed by the wrong people.
  • Secure logins that can be used by your employees and your customers. For instance, layered security logins on your bank website to ensure that customers’ accounts can’t easily be hacked.
  • Integrated security across all of your connected devices and apps. This will ensure that your team is able to work from anywhere, safely.
  • Behaviour analytics that can track any unusual behaviour and alert you of any suspicious logins. This can be used for both employee and customer accounts alike.

Scalability

The financial services can’t afford to stick to purely traditional, inflexible, infrastructures. The opportunity cost of keeping your data out of the cloud is simply too high for most businesses, especially in a society where the volume and variety of data is accumulating at an ever-increasing velocity. Without predictive growth, or enough revenue to expand at short notice, financial services must invest in a long term cloud solutions that offer them growth and flexibility.

By moving some of your data onto the cloud, you have the chance to scale your business alongside your growth, as well as open yourself up to a wealth of data that can be used for customer insights and predictions. In other words, your company is able to grow your business, as well as work on perfecting customer relationships.

This scalable cloud service can be bought on a ‘pay as you go’ basis, meaning that your company can only pay for what’s used.

Innovation

You have all of your important data, but now it’s down to you to squeeze out the potential. The Internet of Things and machine learning allow businesses to create both business and customer-orientated offerings. This essentially can change the way you manage and communicate with your customers.

Instead of having a distant approach to customer spending, banks and insurance companies could begin to take a personalised interest in their day-to-day lives. So rather than giving sound advice in in-branch meetings, bankers could send personalised spending suggestions via mobile apps, smart home connected devices, or potentially even ATMs.

But convenience and advice shouldn’t just be found and given on technological devices. People like talking to people, too, and that’s one thing most mobile applications can’t offer…yet. An example of a bank that practices convenient customer service, using advanced analytic opportunities, is NatWest. This bank uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions to instantly open up a customer’s individual file – with all of their bank information, within seconds of a call. This not only streamlines employee business operations, it also creates a more convenient service for customers, by cutting down on holding time and increasing personalised responses.

The intelligent cloud and you

At the end of the day, your future must be based around what matters to your business and your customers. Regardless of which cloud platform you choose to use, your business must focus on what needs to be reinvented or made better. Or even what separates your financial service apart from the rest.

The intelligent cloud can offer you a wealth of opportunities, but it’s your responsibility to listen to your employees and customers and make the changes that they want to see.

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