Scott Mullins, AWS: what do we need to know about cloud in 2019

Scott Mullins, Head of WorldWide Financial Services Business Development. 

"In fact, I lead a team of experts in financial services, whose only function is to help our clients, both in terms of start-ups FinTech, and up to the largest banks, brokerage and dealer companies, and Shores use our tools that we do daily, and we really enjoy doing it. Watching this is really exciting. I think that in 2019 we will have several success stories. The first thing I would like to say is that if you look at the last few inventions, you will see more and more financial institutions coming forward and talking about what they are doing in the cloud. They had experiments, they had some basics that they had laid in the last couple of years, and now they have the confidence to do two things.

• №1. Most financial institutions do not want to talk about something until they have figured it out and do not know if it works. This year, Guardian Insurance Company talked about how they changed the 158-year-old company and how they made it agile and flexible. They really were able to close a question about the data center. I think I see more of this, and this means that you will see a much more accelerated transformation of the industry itself. I think you will see that more and more organizations are coming out and saying that the cloud is an important part of their IT strategy in the future. 
• №2. I think you will see that a much richer ecosystem is a bonus that you can get. You saw Bloomberg go out and talk about working with AWS a couple of weeks ago. He said that the electron works on AWS. We work very closely with Broadridge, Finical, Temenos and many others. There are many such customers who go through large-scale transformations and say to their providers: “Listen, I like the relationships that we have, but I move to the cloud. If we want to continue to collaborate, then go to the cloud with me. ”These providers respond very positively to such changes, or they are already applying a new strategy. The IHS market, which spoke several years ago about the future of financial services in the cloud: “Transformations are necessary before our customers say that we could be ahead of others.” I think these will be key topics in 2019.

If you are a financial institution, your job is to manage risk. Many are accustomed to managing risks in a very specific way, they have a workbook that they have been using for many years and continue to do so. Changing the structure of a financial institution usually causes a lot of controversy. You do not want to change anything, because the last time you passed an exam or passed an audit, you have gained confidence that it works. You have a PlayBook, but suddenly your business and your development teams say that we have all these new tools that we can use, which require changes, and which can be complex and therefore all of our customers want to be flexible in terms of FinTech.

Startups know that they can be flexible due to the toolkits that we offer. They can immediately start creating a completely new company. As for developed companies, they have to go through a global transformation. Therefore, it is very important to realize this in the early stages, which was done by the Capital Market. They were one of the first to introduce the cloud, and they're still the driving force behind the adoption of the cloud. And now you see how global, significant banks make this an important part of their IT strategy.

Next year, I'm going to move 30–40 percent of my application portfolio to the cloud for 18 months, so flexibility will still be important. The point is to be more agile and more responsive to the market.

We are really focused on it right now and we are moving forward, helping our clients with these changes. We can assume that all these changes are influenced by technology, but it is not so. People manage financial institutions, and people make these decisions. These people who actually manage financial institutions will need their team to learn new skills, to have a deep understanding of what new toolboxes are and how they can use them, to do what they did in the past and then do a whole bunch new things and be able to innovate quickly. "