Cloud-ier days inevitable for banks

Grazed from FierceFinanceIT. Author: Jim Kim.

Are we moving toward a day when banks will be forced to do everything in the cloud? That is a long ways in the future, given privacy regulations and the like. But it is fair to say that the sheer economics of cloud computing have led banks to embrace cloud-based initiatives across the board. Bank Systems & Technology looks at four areas that appear ripe for cloud approaches: payments, document management, platforms and analytics.

Payments certainly seem a good fit, even if bank executives do not know it. "As banks tentatively look to move more functions to hosted environments, perhaps one of the most natural to bring to the cloud is payments," the article states. "After all, notes Celent senior analyst Gareth Lodge, banks are already doing some payments processing in the cloud, even if they don’t realize it…

Lodge says several vendors already offer services run virtually that involve payments, such as hosted online banking and card processing, to which many banks already subscribe."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.fiercefinanceit.com/story/cloud-ier-days-inevitable-banks/2013-12-10