Listen to Sanjay Chikarmane, SVP and General Manager of Global Technology Solutions at SAP, talking about banking’s future in the cloud.
http://youtu.be/LsX-GKZjHYI
The cloud has been high on the list of corporate buzzwords for some time now – in part because, for many businesses, the benefits of process optimisation through conventional methods have hit a point of diminishing returns.
However, banking has been less eager to embrace the language of the cloud – and for good reasons. An industry which has traditionally developed in-house, and for which security is absolutely paramount, has approached shared solutions and online storage with caution.
That is expected to change as the arguments for Cloud solutions become undeniable. SAP estimates that in 2015 banking spend on Cloud solutions will reach €2 billion.
One of the key drivers moving banking towards the cloud is the need to meet their corporate clients’ changing needs. Businesses are spreading their capital and their financial processes between multiple banks, as a protection against liquidity crises – but they want to be able to manage all of these banking relationships through a single interface, and with a clear picture of where their capital is, and what it is doing.
The SAP Financial Services Network will enable payment, remittance tracking, statements, monitoring and alerts – along with other important functions – to take place in SAP’s dedicated cloud. At either end, the FSN will work with SAP’s own and third-party tools on the premises.
This end-to-end solution will standardize the way banks and corporate customers interact. This puts the focus on optimizing a single way of working, not integrating multiple disparate systems – or entities – which may be set up differently in every instance.
So, the advantages of payments in the cloud can be seen at the planning and implementation stage, where complex transactional landscapes can feed into a standardised layer. They can be seen in operation, where the cloud layer provides a secure and integrated environment for multiple processes. And they can be seen in the future, where growing demand can scale without the need for new infrastructure, and solutions to emerging needs can be rapidly deployed.
Sanjay Chikarmane, SVP and General Manager of Global Technology Solutions at SAP, gave a presentation at the International SAP Conference for Banking 2012 on SAP’s work with Citibank on moving corporate payments into the cloud.
