- Google Cloud has announced deals with several large financial firms — including CME Group, Deutsche Bank, and PayPal —over the past 10 months.
- Ulku Rowe, technical director for financial services at Google Cloud, told Business Insider there has been increased momentum among financial firms to adopt the public cloud after years of resistance.
- "I think it's kind of past the tipping point in financial services. That hesitation to move to the cloud has been overcome by the industry as a whole," she said.
- Rowe highlighted the three areas financial firms are most keen to leverage the public cloud.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Google Cloud has enjoyed a string of big wins recently, especially when it comes to nabbing clients in financial services as Wall Street has finally come around to using the public cloud.
On Wednesday, Chicago-based exchange operator CME Group announced it would extend its relationship with Google Cloud to offer additional forms of its market data via the public cloud. That comes a little more than a week after Deutsche Bank formed a strategic, multi-year partnership with Google Cloud.
Other deals with financial firms over the past 10 months include Deutsche Bӧrse Group, the German-based exchange operator, UK-based Lloyds Banking Group, and, as originally reported by Business Insider in November, payments giant PayPal.
Ulku Rowe, technical director for financial services at Google Cloud, told Business Insider that these deals point to a wider trend occuring across Wall Street.
"I think it's kind of past the tipping point in financial services. That hesitation to move to the cloud has been overcome by the industry as a whole. There's a lot more appetite and there's a lot more momentum in the market," she said.
Wall Street is focused on customer experience, data, and machine learning
Wall Street's acceptance of the public cloud has been a slow burn. While other industries have raced to leverage the technology in hopes of cutting costs or innovating faster, financial firms have remained more reluctant due to security and regulatory concerns.
But in recent years, even those who seemed most opposed to public cloud adoption have turned the corner.
Rowe, who started her career in finance working at UBS, Bank of America, and JPMorgan before joining Google Cloud in 2017, highlighted a handful of areas where Wall Street is looking to cloud providers for help.
First, and most timely, is the push to digitize offerings for customers. While seemingly every firm on Wall Street is interested in boosting digital adoption, the coronavirus pandemic has only accelerated those efforts, Rowe said.
At its core, the goal is to create better customer experience and connect in better ways with clients, she added.
To that point, data, and the proper way to use it, is also top of mind, Rowe said. Cloud providers, with their ability to spin data centers up or down at a moment's notice, are positioned to meet those information requirements from financial firms.
"We're definitely seeing an acceleration and a need to be able to understand data better," Rowe said.
"Data is at the core of financial services in every single area," she added.
Machine learning also continues to be an area of interest for financial firms, Rowe said, and a place where cloud providers can lend a hand.
And while Wall Street has experimented with machine-learning techniques for years, Rowe said that some firms have reached a level of maturity to begin rolling it out into production. In particular, she cited natural-language processing (NLP), and the desire to understand documents faster.
Rowe highlighted the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as an example of a document-heavy process that firms looked to use NLP for.
The firms have been able to "use NLP to be able to really extract information and speed up those back-office processes," she said.
Flexibility is a key differentiator for Google Cloud
For all the success Google Cloud has enjoyed, it still faces significant competition.
Amazon Web Services remains the industry leader, thanks in large part to its first-mover advantage. Microsoft, meanwhile, has continued to make up ground. IBM has a renewed focus on the space, specifically in finance, under the guidance of former Bank of America chief technology officer Howard Boville, who now serves as the tech giant's senior vice president of cloud.
Google Cloud has also done its own recruiting from potential clients, nabbing long-time Citi executive Yolande Piazza to serve as vice president of financial services.
Ulku doesn't necessarily shy away from the competition, instead citing Google Cloud's ability to work with competing cloud providers as a differentiator. Its Anthos product, for example, allows customers to work between private and public data centers regardless of provider and counts KeyBank as an early adopter.
Working across multiple providers and between public and private data centers has been a top priority for many on Wall Street.
"That is a very attractive proposition because it gives our customers workload mobility," Rowe said.
"If you can quickly move those workloads around, imagine the kind of response that you can get in your systems," she said.
Read more: