Loraine Lawson
Good day. Welcome to the Buzz, a Bank Automation News podcast. I’m Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and recently I spoke with Chinmoy Banerjee, corporate vice president and global head of banking at consulting company Hexaware Technologies. The banking division focuses on automation, customer experience transformation and helping banks accelerate their use of cloud, among other things. I asked Banerjee to explain what technology parameters banks need to consider when moving to the cloud.

Chinmoy Banerjee
So, you know, firstly, banks need to leverage, you know, cloud and modern technology to deliver improved customer experiences, right, at a lower cost in real time. And essentially, this requires the collection and processing of multiple data sources, and modernization of legacy systems. And of course, you know, they’re outdated operating. Without this improved infrastructure, banks will be ill equipped to compete with them more responsive, and innovative competitors that they’re seeing today, especially the fintechs, right. To address this need for capacity and speed, banks, increasingly are looking to cloud and cloud computing solutions to store data and support analytics, right. And this results in them being able to provide increased customer insights, improve efficiency, enhance innovation, get more agility. And as an overarching organization advantage. These cloud solutions can augment human productivity, and positively impact both their front office and back office transformation. Right? What advantages does banks you know, get by moving to cloud, essentially, they will get key benefits in switching to cloud banking. There’ll be no need for large and hefty infrastructure costs, the same money can be invested in running the operation smoothly, they will have less fear of security while using internet-based solutions. They can reach out to a very large customer base through various mobile and app based features. And essentially, overall cloud technology will help banks become much more swifter in operations by deploying new services to customers.

Loraine Lawson
So I think there’s a, you know, a business case for moving to the cloud is pretty clear. But are there issues that can come up? from the technology standpoint, when they’re considering moving a certain application to the Cloud? Are there things they should consider? situations where maybe It’s not cloud enabled.

Chinmoy Banerjee
Yes. So, of course, there are challenges. And, you know, there are certain things that bank showed, you know, first of all, what are the challenges, right? When the banks are planning to migrate to the cloud, especially in the large banking center, the first one is they have huge monolithic applications, which have been built over, you know, many years, many decades, even with a lot of customization, right. Second, is the lack of skilled resources, who have comprehensive, comprehensive know how of the internal wiring of these monolithic applications, right. The actions required, therefore, when banks are looking for moving to cloud, a successful migration to cloud and re engineering of legacy processes and workflows, right. And the challenges that are there. And the challenges are lacking a clear strategy determined by business objectives. Enormous cloud sprawl caused by not having a clear understanding of the full scope of the cloud environment. Budget and exceeding the planned budget, security, weak points and failures of critical services, human errors and a lack of skills required to operate the new infrastructure, right. So all of these are challenges that banks have to consider technology and otherwise from a change perspective, right? When they’re looking at moving to cloud. And the good news is that none of these challenges are, you know, without solutions, right, we can help the banks overcome these challenges in cloud migration, right? And how do we do that? You know, firstly, we have to understand that not all applications are fit for cloud, right. And we’ll talk about each of this in a little bit more detail. The second thing is, you know, don’t try Big Bang, start small, start simple, by large applications tend to deliver the most value and migrate to the cloud, you know, they can be also the hardest move, right? The bigger they are more complex they are. So first we have to, you know, get comfortable in the first two rounds of workloads, you know, tackle the monster apps with the process and the team are battle tested, if you will, right. Third thing seems simple. But if you fail to plan, you know, you’re planning to fail in migrating legacy applications to cloud is in many ways, at least as complex and difficult as a heart transplant. Right. So, you know, planning very well, would be key to, you know, implementing some of these challenges, if you will.

Loraine Lawson
of course, you can always hire and skills, but are there positions, type of type of positions or skill sets that banks should hire on staff when moving mission critical applications to the cloud?

Chinmoy Banerjee
Yeah, so, we feel that, you know, the architecting of it, the program, management of it at the highest levels is something that banks for sure showed the, you know, staff, the strategy of it is something that banks should staff on their own, because they should be owners of their own destiny. And, you know, while someone like hexaware can look at cloud consulting, and, you know, enable a bank to go to the entire journey. Ultimately, the goal of the journey itself, you know, lies with the bank, right, so something that the bank should stuff on their own is certainly the strategy and the, you know, the architect, part of the workflow range is something to the banquet.

Loraine Lawson
Are there ways in which moving to the cloud supports automation for financial institutions? Like there are ways you can automate maybe that you couldn’t automate before when you move things to the cloud?

Chinmoy Banerjee
Yes. So firstly, there is just more automation tools available on cloud, right? You have, you know, more analytics available, you have more automation tools available out of the box itself. That is, you know, more available on the cloud than on on prem. So that number one, right, and we work with, you know, Microsoft, as your we work with GCP, we work with AWS, and a lot of things come out of the box itself, right. We also are able to, therefore, utilize the infrastructure that cloud provides, as opposed to continuously buying infrastructure on prem. And that will significantly help in automation, if you will, right. And from a data perspective, given given our, you know, close collaboration with snowflake as an example, right, that’s another, you know, enhanced, you know, ability for us to offer automation, using the data using the infrastructure using analytics, through, you know, the hyperscale cloud providers,

Loraine Lawson
can you give me some specific examples of how banks have automated after they’ve moved to the cloud?

Chinmoy Banerjee
Specifically, in Analytics, you know, we have, for example, a bunch of banks, where we provide card analytics, that is easily delivered now that we have moved to cloud, where we are able to, you know, give them advanced analytic solutions, and are able to scale from, you know, the millions of customers to several millions, really, and much more cheaper. That is one Secondly, we are able to pour these, Merce able to add more functionalities much quicker when, you know, when and practically on demand. Because the analytics that is required from a business leader who is a p&l head, or to someone who is running an IT function to someone who’s running operations continuously keep evolving and changing almost every quarter. Previously, we used to take in these requirements, you know, we used to do the, you know, development of them. And there used to be a time lag by when we could have delivered these reports back to them. But now, you know, given their own cloud and their more analytics firepower available in the cloud, we are able to deliver this much quicker, almost, you know, 1/10 of the time that used to do previously, right. And it has therefore grown too, from one or two customers to a basket of 1020 customers, if you will, where we are providing this as a service, as opposed to just providing one off work to, you know, specific facts.

Loraine Lawson
Okay. Um, we talked about the challenges a little bit, are there things applications, in particular, I’m wondering that just should not be moved to the cloud, for whatever reason? Maybe there are technical barriers, like I’m trying to imagine what some technical barriers might even be that would keep an application off the cloud. But what have you encountered? Yeah,

Chinmoy Banerjee
so, you know, most of our most of the bank’s legacy applications will need to be modified, right? For the cloud. Legacy applications that sit on legacy operating systems and proprietary hardware systems will essentially need to be modified to run in the cloud, right examples include applications that are currently running on mainframes or engineered systems that can’t be re hosted. And those that require a load balancer, for example, distribute, you know, network or application traffic across a number of servers, right. So these applications, for example, will need to be replaced before moving to the cloud. So that’s one exam, right? With replatforming. The applications remained essentially the same, of course, as you know, but challenges are made, changes are made to ensure they can function well on the cloud, right. The design of some applications or the infrastructure depends on might prevent them from being able to comply with security policies. protocols in a cloud environment, right? And these applications will then need to be refactored or rebuilt before being moved. Right? We have to just accept that some applications can’t be moved to the cloud at all right? These applications are that depend on high performance, right? And low latencies to function well likely cannot be migrated to the cloud at all right? They can perhaps be modernized, but they should remain in the on prem data center or shifted out to the network edge. So in summary, you know, most of your legacy applications, banks, legacy applications will need to be modified for the cloud. And then some applications, as I said, that depend on high performance and low latencies really can’t be moved to the cloud. It’s not like everything has to move to the cloud. Okay.

Loraine Lawson 15:45
And when you talk modification, are you talking about do they have to be reprogrammed from the particular language or just API enabled? What does that mean?

Chinmoy Banerjee 15:55
Yeah. So, you know, if they are currently running on mainframes, or engineered systems, that can’t be you know, re hosted. And these applications will leave the platform, right. And with replatforming, the applications, what happens is they remain the same, they’re essentially the same. But changes are made to ensure that they can function well on the cloud, right? For application itself is the same. But you know, they have to be changed to ensure that they can function on the platform, right. And some applications will need to be factored or rebuilt, in this case, they have to be changed in itself. Because as opposed to, you know, the earlier replatforming example, that will make them better suited for the cloud, in this case, rebuilding might involve rebuilding the entire application, right? So if you’re rebuilding the entire application, why go through the same mistakes, if any, that you’ve made in the past? So it’s a complete rebuild? Rebuild?

Loraine Lawson 16:59
Okay, are there any interesting use cases you’d seen with banks that you’d like to mention or share?

Chinmoy Banerjee 17:06
So, you know, given that banks have a lot of legacy applications, you know, right now, our journey are mostly to move things to the cloud. Right. And we have started with a few of the top 10 banks that we serve, if you will, and most of them is to do with moving to the cloud using our maze platform. And we are, you know, now starting to also look at modernization, if you will, working with, you know, certain smaller banks, if you will, where we are looking at, for example, a credit risk application, right, that was really legacy, and we are rebuilding it completely, and keeping it on prem and modernizing that credit risk application, that then just taking whatever was there and moving to the cloud, if you will, right. So that’s a good example, where a creditors application which is core to this lending institution that we work with the bank that we work with, and rebuilding it complete.

Loraine Lawson
You’ve been listening to the Buzz, a Bank Automation News podcast. Thank you for your time, and be sure to visit us at Bank automation news.com for more automation news. You can also follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Please don’t hesitate to rate this podcast on your podcast platform of choice.