How FIS’s cloud modernization drives growth and market expansion

FIS’s experience had been that the Microsoft cloud is a trusted, comprehensive, integrated and open cloud platform. It spans six critical areas — security, infrastructure, digital and app innovation, data and AI, business applications, and modern work and aligned well with the needs of FIS’s cloud project. Additionally, when EY became part of the team, it brought an innovative mindset, design thinking and a data-centric approach to the initiative. This included a great wealth of knowledge in building solutions in Microsoft Azure; cloud native technology; and very strong project management experience.

“At EY, we bring these disciplines together in a highly orchestrated and coordinated way, and in collaboration with Microsoft, we bring deep domain experience coupled with extensive technology capabilities and platform know-how to bring new innovative solutions to our clients in ways they had not thought imaginable,” said Dan Connolly, EY US Consulting Financial Services Cloud Leader and Managing Director for FSO at Ernst & Young LLP.

Working with FIS, the EY-Microsoft Alliance team initially identified a set of high-profile, high-growth projects that would deliver value quickly and, more importantly, help the team learn what was working, not working, and how they needed to course-correct. The first round of projects also helped FIS developers see what was possible, giving them the ability to accelerate in the development environment, to rapidly help enable replication after the original projects were completed. “The team did a great job of collaborating, understanding FIS’s goals, and by doing that, defining what modernization looked like. We were able to come together and build out great targeted architectures that would provide the roadmap for how we would develop and modernize these solutions in Azure,” Connolly said.

The second round of projects focused more on production, helping FIS to streamline and automate its entire solution deployment process. As a result of the migration to cloud, solutions previously deployed in days or weeks can now be deployed automatically in minutes. For example, FIS can shave months off a project by immediately having its environment ready, going straight into product configuration.

Delivering value to their clients

The advantages FIS clients realize through the cloud modernization project include more flexibility in how they can deploy FIS solutions and faster time to value. In addition, they have the ability to use elastic scaling, where they can scale up and get more capacity when needed and then scale back down when they no longer need that capacity. FIS clients can experience improved operational performance and security. “The ability to automatically deploy and run our products in the cloud provides FIS clients with a reliable service that is updated on a regular basis with new business value and the latest security updates,” stated Scott Marean, FIS Chief Technology Officer for Lending, Investment Operations and Data Solutions.

And with many of its large financial institution clients needing the ability to run FIS products and store their data in different geographic locations — due to data sovereignty and data privacy requirements — cloud modernization gives FIS the ability to use a public cloud to host customers in locations throughout the world vs. building its own data centers and capabilities across each geographic region.

Modernization benefits for FIS

By leveraging cloud technologies FIS is able to innovate a lot faster, improve the cost and performance of its solutions, better the customer experience for all of its clients, and drive more revenue. Cloud modernization also positions FIS for the future in ways that it can explore new business models and expand how it goes to market by utilizing the public cloud. For example, in addition to going to market with its traditional product offerings, utilizing the public cloud enables FIS to break up its solutions into smaller offerings — selling just the offerings as a service — as well as have the flexibility of launching new solutions on demand around the world. The result is that the cloud modernization journey gives FIS the ability to grow into new geographies and to expand into new markets quickly and cost-effectively. A modernization of this nature further strengthens FIS's position as a market leader in financial services technology.

What’s next for FIS

“We’re really excited about the benefits we’re getting from this cloud modernization program and the collaboration that we’ve had with EY and Microsoft,” stated Tara Winters, FIS Capital Markets Senior Vice President for Managed Services and Cloud Strategy. She added, “We can now deploy modernized solutions more rapidly, and have upskilled our teams to be able to continue to develop in cloud native technologies to expand our capabilities more broadly for clients. We’re looking at what’s next, and how we can continue to leverage our relationship with EY and Microsoft to expand into other capital market solutions.”

Conclusion

The FIS cloud modernization project gives credence in illustrating that the cloud is transformative, creating a new standard for the way organizations and even industries work — being more responsive to their customers and the market, driving new ways of working and operating at speed, and having the ability to innovate with new solutions in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before.