Our View: Financial Services Summit

Alastair Lumley – Digital Native & Finance Lead, Netpremacy

Last week I attended Google Cloud’s Financial Services Summit to learn from Google experts and others from across the industry on what the future holds for the Finance Industry. I discovered how Google Cloud is driving real change and helping to reshape the industry, from modernising more traditional businesses to supporting the challenger banks. 

Straight from the opening keynote, Google made it pretty clear that Financial Services are a huge focus area for them. They are currently dealing with some of the largest financial institutions globally, including HSBC and Deutsche Bank. This experience is helping them to shape and evolve their cloud services to better meet the needs of the industry. This had led to them becoming the only cloud provider to develop focused and dedicated services for the Financial industry,  two of which were launched at the summit – Lending Doc AI and DataShare.

Google also highlighted their three key focus areas within the financial industry; accelerating omnichannel experiences, using data and analytics to transform businesses and modernising core operations in banking and payments. These were covered in the different streams run on the day, including Banking, Capital markets, Insurance and Payments. We heard from Deutsche Bank on how cloud services have driven innovation, how PayPal used them to weather the Covid storm and how BNY Mellon constantly evolves, attracts the best talent and adapts to new challenges. You can watch the on-demand sessions here.

Event Round-Up

The key theme of the summit was how Cloud Computing is enabling the Financial Services industry to innovate and react to consumer demands and specifically how Google Cloud is the go-to strategic partner for the industry to drive this type of change. 

One session I found particularly interesting covered how Google and HSBC are currently working together to make banking more sustainable and lower their environmental impact. Work so far included evaluating supply chains, identifying where they are most economical and sustainable and exploring ways to improve this. Taking experience from both sides of the table – a global retail bank with vast knowledge of supporting businesses of all shapes and sizes, and combining that with Google who understands how to problem solve using innovation….one to keep an eye on! 

Another fascinating discussion was how banks are helping to improve the house buying process. The key learning was to avoid using technology for the sake of it and automate an existing bad process – we should use it to drive change.  The house buying process is one of the most complex and emotionally stressful purchases you’ll ever make so a lot of focus is now going into how can this become more enjoyable and how can technology play a pivotal role in this. 

There were many more sessions covered such as how we can activate a data strategy in insurance by leveraging Google’s products and its partner network to start and implement these projects, all the way through to how innovation in the financial industry can help innovation in other industries.

Key Takeaways

Financial organisations globally are leveraging cloud technologies to innovate and provide better solutions to challenges, better services to customers and become more economically and socially responsible. Google is actively helping drive this change and developing solutions focused on the financial services industry by engaging and supporting some of the largest institutions globally. 

Each journey is different and will have its own goals and outcomes, but the opportunity for any organisation to transform and drive change is there. From using data to improve customer understanding, fighting against fraud and leveraging scalable cloud infrastructure to meet spikes in demands, what is important across the board is the correct support, partner and technology along the way. 

That’s where Google and Netpremacy can help. By understanding what it is you want to achieve, helping define and build plans and strategies around the technology, you can reach your desired aims and objectives much faster, in a way that future-proofs your success. 

To hear more about how to transform your organisation, or to register an interest in our upcoming roundtable for Financial Services, email me.