IBM Financial Services for Cloud initiative wins support of more than 100 collaborators

IBM claims to have secured support for its push to provide sector-specific public cloud offerings to financial services firms from more than 100 collaborators since the initiative made its debut in March 2020.

Billed as a cloud development environment tailored to the technology and regulatory needs of financial services companies, the IBM Cloud for Financial Services is geared towards accelerating adoption of off-premise technologies by firms in this sector.

Users of the platform are encouraged to use it to host their VMware-based virtual machine workloads, while drawing on the capabilities of IBM-owned Red Hat’s Openshift technology to create cloud-native applications. 

IBM Cloud for Financial Services entered general availability in April 2021 and, in the lead-up to this milestone, a number of contributors and collaborators joined the project to ensure it offered what financial services companies need and want from a public cloud platform.

Contributors included financial services companies such as the Bank of America, Luminor Bank and MUFG, as well as independent software vendors (ISVs) with a background in building applications and services for banks, building societies and investment firms, for example.

In a blog post co-authored by Brendan Kinkade, vice-president of technology and hybrid cloud partnerships at IBM, and Joel Spieth, general manager for IBM Cloud for Financial Services, the company confirmed the initiative had secured the support of more than 100 ecosystem partners.

“As our momentum increases, so will the benefits for customers,” said the pair in the blog post. “Our growing ecosystem will enable customers to further streamline operations, increase efficiencies, reduce risk, decrease compliance costs, and accelerate revenue growth as more partners continue to onboard.

“We’re speeding cloud adoption in the financial services industry by offering a cloud with a built-in security and regulatory framework that helps partners and their customers accelerate their journeys to the cloud.”

The work of these 100-plus contributors is helping financial services companies around the world to accelerate the pace of their cloud-led digital transformation journeys, while ensuring their compliance and regulatory requirements are met.

“Financial institutions are accelerating innovation to meet heightened customer expectations, deliver consistent services in the face of challenges like the global pandemic, and navigate the ever-complex regulatory environment,” said the blog post. 

“But that can only happen if security and compliance controls are baked into the platform from the onset. Otherwise, the likelihood of a large-scale data breach dramatically [increases] as developers across the supply chain potentially develop and run applications on a cloud platform – or multiple clouds – that haven’t been properly configured or adequately vetted for identity and access management.”