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In today’s competitive market, where firms face increased competition from cloud-based fintechs and big tech companies who are branching out into financial services, the need to innovate is more critical than ever.
Through cloud-based innovation, your firm can gain deep data insights, develop new products and services, improve client service, empower employees to do their best work, and streamline operations.
However, becoming an innovative future-ready business is much easier to say than do. You want to innovate – but you’re understandably cautious. After all, there are many barriers to entry. Consider the following:
The skill sets needed to manage cloud and drive innovation are in high demand, and it’s hard to get access to those individuals – particularly for financial services organizations. Moreover, these individuals come with an investment that can be hard to justify in the current climate.
While larger, more digitally mature businesses have dedicated teams in place to develop innovative strategies, if you’re a small or mid-market firm it can be far harder to paint a picture of what innovation means to your business. You may have questions, such as:
Without answers to these questions it’s hard to make a business case for cloud innovation because you can’t visualize how it ties into broader business goals.
Your firm has complex needs. You want to enable a distributed and mobile workforce and ensure that the systems, applications, and data they interact with are secure and compliant with global regulations.
However, it’s increasingly difficult for any firm to be secure, compliant, flexible, and innovative at the same time. Consequently, innovation may be put on hold as security and other priorities take precedence. But, in the absence of innovation, your business is exposed to future threats, operational latency, and inflexibility.
Legacy technology is a significant hurdle to innovation. Perhaps your tried and trusted on-premises infrastructure has reached the end of its lifecycle, limiting your data insights and ability to automate. Or you spend time and resources spinning up virtual machines, setting up a SQL Server license, and bringing in data scientists to start a new data project – creating another high and costly barrier to innovation. At the end of the day, you need a way to make delivering innovation simpler and more consumable. The cloud can be the catalyst that makes that happen.
The first step to overcoming hurdles to innovation, is to stop thinking of the cloud as a deliverable product or “thing.” Innovation isn’t just about “cool technology” – it’s about identifying and implementing ways to use innovation to serve your business.
Look for a provider who can help with this process. One who can:
Part of this will include showing businesses the risk of not doing something – if you aren’t establishing the groundwork that enables organizational extensibility, are you prepared to assume the risk of not being able to hit organizational goals?
Also, look for an advisor who can help you better leverage data. Data is one of the most sought-after enablers of innovation. In most cases, though, much of that data is held by third parties, such as fund administrators and prime brokers, making it difficult for you to conduct detailed analysis of your investments and portfolios on an ad hoc basis. Or perhaps you’ve built advanced and complex data platforms that have become unwieldy and expensive to manage. A lot of this administrative and operational management can be outsourced.
Finally, work with a provider who can address your fears and complexities around data loss prevention and global compliance directives. To leverage data – especially PII and IP – in innovative ways, you need a partner who can provide secure access to your assets and data, backed by proactive, cloud management that aligns to regulations.
With a secure and compliant cloud as your foundation, and with your key innovators liberated to focus on delivering business value, the groundwork and technologies will be in place to enable you to adopt and scale innovation in your business – across data, applications, and more.
