The local financial services industry can improve their services through so-called cloud computing, a high-ranking official of a telecommunications firm said.
Banks, Globe Telecom Inc. Executive Vice President for International and Business Markets Gil B. Genio said, should follow the digital lifestyle that their customers are now embracing.
“It is an inevitable fact that we as customers, whether in the retail or corporate setting, are going digital, by the way we want to be engaged, from various social-media platforms to the mobile applications to access content, which are resident in the cloud. This is also true with the way we now do banking transactions,” he said.
Businesses, he added, should continue to invest in infrastructure, citing a 2014 Deloitte study on the right balance and trade-offs between cost and growth.
“Similar to a telecommunications company such as Globe, the cost of infrastructure goes up every year, thus, we have to keep on investing. From a cost perspective, it is a matter of transitioning from trying to do everything by yourself and changing the cost model, from a capital expenditure-driven one to something like ‘pay-as-you-go,’” he said.
“All current customer experience through a mobile phone, or what one does over the Internet, is facilitated because there is a cloud-infrastructure behind it—for instance, when we do mobile banking. No doubt, without us probably realizing it, we as bank customers are placing information through various cloud-infrastructures. However, we need to place necessary platforms in order to properly secure those bits of data,” Genio explained.
He cited, for example, rural banks that are “more open to use the cloud.”
“In considering the cloud, a group of 10 rural banks can save on costs from 20 percent to 25 percent if they employ what is called a ‘community cloud,’ a shared infrastructure among several organizations where some of the cost savings potential of cloud computing are realized,” the executive said.
He added: “In terms of security levels, it requires a member-organization to impose additional security measures as necessary. This is in contrast with a cheaper public cloud where there are more users but limited control over the cloud environment, or with a private cloud for individual organizations or group of companies where owners have complete jurisdiction, but can be more expensive to put up.”
Banks can start adopting cloud computing with basic steps such as considering colocation in the Globe data centers, he said.
“Another alternative is to subscribe to Globe information-technology Enabled Services’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service, both of which are evidently better options than buying new equipment,” Genio noted.
“Forward-thinking banks,” he said, can also maximize their cloud by harnessing the practice of harvesting information through Big Data and processing those through analytics, which can be used to study and understand customers.
“The capability of a cloud provider, such as Globe can help IT companies invest in necessary secure infrastructure. At the end of the day, it is all about pursuing opportunities, while simultaneously trying to limit risks, and getting up to scale and rationalizing operations,” Genio said.