Consulting giant Accenture and cloud banking firm nCino are expanding the scope of their partnership beyond North America to get more financial institutions in the Asia-Pacific and EMEA markets up and running in the cloud.

Pullen Daniel, international managing director at nCino, told Bank Innovation the companies are finding increased interest in cloud banking around the world, due to such factors as regulatory pressure to cut costs and market demand to serve customers in “a more innovative fashion.”

“Other banks are starting to come along,” he said. “We’re starting to see strong momentum and we’re adding resources to these markets, in terms of people and products, as fast as we can.”

But the lingering question is whether FIs are ready to change the way they do business.

“As much as anything, nCino is a business process reengineering program, versus an IT project,” Daniel said. “The bank, once it figures out if it’s culturally ready to do things that are quite different, doesn’t necessarily question whether the program will work or be impactful, but whether they’re ready to accept change so that the program is as successful as it can be.”

nCino’s Bank Operating System is an end-to-end banking platform that provides customer relationship management, loan origination, customer onboarding and deposit account opening, workflow, enterprise content management, and instant reporting capabilities in a single cloud-based solution. The system is built on the Salesforce platform, spanning several lines of business including commercial, retail, treasury and small business, while also providing a little extra shelter from big unknowns.

“From an infrastructure perspective, even if Brexit were to move forward, Salesforce has data centers in Paris and Frankfurt, so, if I’m an EU customer, I don’t have to worry that my database is going to sit outside the EU anymore,” Daniel said. “Being on the right platform has taken away some massive barriers in cloud adoption that otherwise may have been an issue when you get into things like GDPR, or open banking, or data residency, and other topics of that nature.”

Daniel said banks choosing nCino’s solution are able to respond more nimbly to shifts in regulations and customer needs because of the platform’s inherent flexibility. The product is the same for clients of all sizes in all locations, just configured differently for the bank’s specific use case.

Accenture and nCino, in which Accenture Ventures holds a minority investment, have worked together since 2014. Building on a number of client projects with the likes of Santander and SunTrust, and in response to strong market demand, Daniel said the companies already have active engagements underway in markets including the U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

“We forward-invested very heavily to make sure that things like currency and language are accommodated anywhere in the globe,” Daniel said. “If I’m in Germany and I want to use nCino, that experience should be the exact same as if I used it in Kansas or in New Zealand. Just because I have a different language or a different currency, it shouldn’t matter.”

He said nCino’s 250 global clients already include 13 or 14 outside of the Americas, and that all but three of those 13 or 14 were added just last year. Clients range from community banks, challenger banks and non-bank lenders to banks as large as Santander. Through the expanded alliance, he said, nCino will be able to tap into Accenture’s global delivery capabilities, including more than 350 dedicated nCino-implementation specialists across nine countries.

Increased interest among banks in migrating certain operations and functions to the cloud is hardly a secret. Core overhaul was one of Bank Innovation‘s three trends to watch in 2019, after all.

Todd Matters, co-founder and chief architect for RackWare, a Fremont, Calif.-based hybrid cloud management platform, told Bank Innovation that migration to the cloud by FIs looking to decrease their reliance on legacy systems is not a matter of “if,” but “when.” He said the financial sector is already among the largest adopters and users of cloud technology, thanks to a mix of cost reductions and the ability to respond faster to customers’ needs, although he added it’s not necessarily being used to its full potential.

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