Business In The Cloud

Why traditional companies are adopting cloud applications in a big way

- K.T.P. Radhika

Federal Bank found a silver lining in the cloud two years ago. This was a period when the financial services industry was undergoing a huge transformation, triggered by a host of fintech companies, right from Google’s payment solutions and home-grown Paytm to tens of somewhat smaller start-ups. As use of fintech was becoming an important part of banking, the Kerala-based scheduled private bank wanted to be ahead of the curve by having resilient open banking with help of an API (application protocol interface) on which fintech partners could connect without hassles. An API is a computing interface which defines interactions between multiple software intermediaries.

This was a big change for the traditional bank, which till then had an ad-hoc, on-premise, solution. After looking at a lot of options, it decided to install IBM’s API Connect, a hybrid cloud-based solution, to manage its API ecosystem. “On-premise solutions would have taken months for development, testing and deployment. We wanted the solution up and running at the earliest,” says Shalini Warrier, COO, Federal Bank. “We were operational with a secure cloud-based solution in less than 10 days. This is an integral part of our digital media ecosystem now.” She says the banking sector was hesitant to adopt cloud initially, but for Federal Bank, it has been a preferred choice for the past few years.