Making cloud transformation work for Canadian banks

Yair: What do you think are some of the sustained outcomes that banks are looking to get out of this?

Kyle: I think a lot of times in the past we tried to look at business cases as multi-year and we would find out when those years are complete whether we've returned on our investment or not. Now we're getting to the point where we need to look at things in weeks and months and we may have to pivot. We have to be okay with failure in a rapidly developing world.

In a lot of, call it back in the day, projects that I was involved in, you were so far invested in them, you could not pivot. You had to stay in and contracts were designed that way. So in today's world, we're consuming things as we need it. Even from a consulting perspective, our customers are asking us to deliver services differently. They want them delivered in teams. They don't just want the traditional send me a person that's good at this. So it's forcing us all to change, but at the end of the day, we're measuring ourselves in shorter increments and we're able to show that value.

Yair: One of the things that I'm hearing quite a lot in the bank is the usage of data in the cloud and the ability to do things that you weren't able to do before. Do you have a perspective on that?

Kyle: Everyone's heard the term data is the new oil and it's an interesting comment that makes you think about what does that really mean? What I'm seeing is we've spent a lot of time building the systems. You know the world has been in a POC with cloud for many many years. I think the year of production is coming, this year and next year. Almost all of our projects involve data analytics and then people are starting to look at machine learning. Now you obviously have to build that foundation first, if you get your data into cloud, which is great, can you use it? Can you use the numbers that matter? We're always worried about privacy and PII, which is very important, but nowadays there's tools to automate that and pipelines. And we can prove back to the businesses and regulators that it's safe.

Once it's there and structured, a whole bunch of opportunities come up. We can start to build dashboards, we can start to do analytics. And the things that are possible with machine learning today is pretty staggering. But it's hard to get started. It's a special skill set. It's new. What we've started doing is building a lot of accelerators. We're putting teams together to be very opinionated, build reference architectures and then we want to bring these to our customers and start fast, get to the business problem right away and not be building infrastructure for months. 

Yair: A cloud journey in a bank or a larger organization sounds like a huge undertaking. What advice would you give executives who are either starting their journey or in the midst and looking for changes?

Kyle: Talking to our banking customers, I think they have to look back and do some retrospectives on the last number of years. None of this change is easy. Change is hard. So when we consider our clients, they've made their bets on who their cloud service providers are going to be and now they're in many cases looking at a second. They've picked a lot of SaaS, platform as a service partners. They've been very strategic. They moved a lot of things to the cloud.

What I would say to our customers is make sure that they look at where they were successful but also where did things get tripped up? A lot of processes got put in place inside the banks with good reason. We've also learned about security and zero trust models and we've gotten better at cloud.

So there's stuff our customers can learn from that. And I think they can move faster, but they also need to look at some of that red tape that's been put in place and remove those blockers. The talent we're after today to drive some of these changes, they want to move fast. They want to accomplish something at work every day. So it's important to kind of relook at how we're doing things and pivot and work with regulators, work with our customers, give them advice, make them feel safe and push them on that journey. I think that's our job to push people along.

Yair: Well, Kyle, that was fascinating. Do you have a perspective on what the three, I guess, main key takeaways are as bank executives look to start or modify their cloud journey?

Kyle: I think we have to look back at the success that's happened over the last number of years. We've done a lot of great things. So we have to go back and do some retrospectives and say what worked well. And sometimes it's asking the people that are new, people that have been there a little, getting a diverse perspective is a really big one. But there's other areas that haven't gone so well or we put too much red tape around and it's causing us to move slower. We have to look at what's slowing us down. If it's regulations, if it's too much process, let's automate those type of things.

All that comes from building a solid foundation. It's something people say all the time, but getting that foundation right, gets you to build those second, third, fourth floors. And I think there's ways to look around, talk to your peers, look at projects, look at the industry and build from that. There's a lot of great reference architectures. We're not reinventing the wheel anymore.

And then if anything, we got to get to production in the next couple years. There's been a mountain of dev tests done. We've learned a lot, but we really need a push to production. Get rid of the data centers, retire some of the old applications, modernize. We're going to not really realize that business case if we have the old data center and the old systems around. So we really got to get to production.

Yair: Well, thanks, Kyle. That was awesome. We're super excited about the opportunities for cloud in Canadian banking.

Kyle: Let's keep learning and doing great things.