Financial Services

Too expensive to overhaul, yet costly to maintain. Years of upgrades have made it difficult to keep up with today’s demands, making it time-consuming for teams to do their jobs and add real value where it counts. 

Our client, a leading global bank, realized that to stay competitive and profitable, it had to modernize its entire finance function. Cutting costs was crucial, but above all, they recognized that their existing processes left them less able to fulfil customer and stakeholder demands. 

Previous experiences with technology had left them wary of change. Their question: how can we transform our finance function without breaking the bank? 

We brought together talent, capabilities and insights from across EY’s service lines to encourage innovative thinking and focus on the bank’s long-term goals. These sessions led to the design of 20 different tools enabled by public cloud technology. When delivered with the right training and cultural change initiatives we calculated powerful results, reducing the cost of the finance function by up to 30%. 

The move to public cloud was integral to this success. While many financial services organizations already use private cloud, this is managed by the business themselves, so subject to the same failings as traditional IT infrastructure. Public cloud vendors spend billions each year on their own infrastructure, workforce and cyber security. By embracing the possibilities of public cloud, our client can tap in to unlimited capacity available on demand, whilst paying as they go – safely and securely.

Public cloud will rapidly transform the business by advancing new systems and automating the more mundane aspects of the finance function – freeing up staff to spend more time on value-add tasks. The bank can now execute three times the amount of data in a quarter of the time, at 5% of the cost. This will give a transparent view of the business, with real-time access to numbers from across the organization, allowing them to attain quicker insights, manage risk and improve forecasting.

But cloud isn’t just a space for data. With technologies such as AI requiring huge processing capabilities, power and speed, cloud is the infrastructure that makes it possible. With their adoption of public cloud and new technologies, our client can focus on enabling a new eco-system that’s competitive, customer-centric and digitally enabled.

Dramatic changes to the financial services landscape have made it necessary for traditional banks to adopt emerging technologies and public cloud can be the enabler. 

In helping the bank adopt public cloud in its finance function, we have given them the tools to be safer, more secure, more responsive and more efficient. This allows them to free up existing teams and investment to focus on activities that will make the most difference to their customers.

Public cloud was the silver lining needed to transform this finance function and it all started with a powerful question.