Banks are accelerating their move to the cloud to respond to the pandemic, enable greater operational agility to reduce time to market, and develop open banking capabilities. At the same time, performance dispersion (the operational variance across institutions within the industry) has increased significantly.

Cloud delivery can change operational performance and hyperscale businesses. So, how can banks move their operations to the cloud most effectively, and what tools and frameworks are needed to best adapt cloud operations over time? Infosys has developed a set of tools and frameworks, Cobalt, to address these challenges.

Infosys’ Cobalt Offering

Cobalt, Infosys’ cloud framework offering, is designed to address the key challenges enterprises face when trying to move their operations to the cloud. These challenges include:

• Security: the ubiquitous challenge of the cloud is providing satisfactory cybersecurity   
• Modernizing and innovating their platforms: enterprises are moving to the cloud to modernize their platforms, but access to a broad range of tools and applications in this rapidly emerging market remains a challenge. Maintaining flexibility requires enterprises to avoid vendor lock-in
• Improving speed to market: implementing new solutions quickly and effectively in a multi-cloud environment is subject to wide variation across domains and companies. Access to talent continues to be a gating factor.  

The Cobalt offering provides a solution across these five key areas of accelerated cloud adoption by any enterprise:

• Mainframe modernization: tools for assessment, rules extraction, and component migration 
• Cloud-native development: tools for the development of cloud-native apps
• Database migration: database migration frameworks and tools
• Migration: frameworks and tools for migrating apps to the cloud
• DevOps: tools and frameworks to accelerate the adoption of DevOps across the bank.

Infosys believes cloud migration requires industry-specific IP to fully take advantage of the cloud’s benefits. Infosys has created a financial services-specific Cobalt offering, FS.Live.Cloud, that includes, but is not limited to:

• Open Banking solution: an open banking API platform
• Recon-in-a-box: recon platform to manage operational risk and provide controls
• Mortgage-as-a-service
• Business banking: Virtual CFO
• AML/KYC
• Media platform: digital asset and content management
• Voice-based solution: voice-based solutions integrated into Alexa
• Location-based solution: enhanced CX with value-added services based on location.

This packaged version of FS.Cloud.Live helps mid-size financial institutions with a cloud solution at an overall cost of 15% to 18% lower than buying public cloud services direct. In addition to the services described above, this offering will:

• Host applications from Infosys and third parties (e.g., Actimize, Calypso, Avaloq, and Fiserv)
• Provide clients with the ability to build new cloud-native platforms using accelerators for cloud-native development.

Large financial institutions in most cases have either developed or are developing a comprehensive cloud strategy and they can benefit from leveraging components of FS.Cloud.Live to optimize migration times by 30-40% and deliver a much lower overall TCO.  

Conclusions

Financial institutions of all types are looking to migrate to the cloud with the help of third-party services and technology vendors. Sourcing, organizing, and managing resources is a complex challenge for any financial institution. Infosys has pulled together the relevant components and frameworks necessary to deliver a cloud migration project, with ongoing environment management updates, to enable regional and local banks to capitalize on the cloud opportunity. These services are useable by line-of-business executives, not just technologists, which allows the LOB to directly adapt the capabilities to align with their business objectives.   

As banks migrate more of their operational footprint to a multi-cloud environment, the technology will become more robust. However, the business advantage comes from being an early mover. All financial institutions are looking for the broadest, most robust set of tools, technological and human, to enable them to transform their business models for a more agile, open banking industry. The FS.Cloud.Live platform is a good example of the type of tools banks need to start their cloud journey.