The financial investments arm of the NatWest Group recently migrated its operations to Google Cloud as a way of improving customer service and more rapid operational execution.
NatWest Markets opted to partner with Google’s cloud services arm to meet its goals of achieving high scalability, streamlining compliance with regulatory standards, and offering power productive risk modeling bundled with analytics.
According to the company’s chief risk officer Jeremy Arnold, NatWest Markets’ success is determined by how well – and how quickly – it delivers results to customers. In this case, the company needs to anticipate each client’s requirements and ensure that the right people and technologies are in place to address them.
A Key Advantage
According to NatWest Markets’ head of risk and finance technology Chris Conway, migrating their services to the cloud instead of refreshing and buying new physical servers is part of the company’s drive towards greater efficiency and regulatory compliance.
Conway remarked that the amount of data the company needs to process has grown over time. Similarly, regulatory agencies have become more stringent, while customers want to get faster and more efficient service. That said, the migration was necessary to transform how NewWest Markets delivers service.
Before the partnership with Google, NatWest Markets’ risk applications were housed in a high-performance grid managed by the NatWest Group’s primary technical team. However, given the massive increase of data at speed and the need to replace servers that are approaching their end of life, the risk and finance technology department opted to migrate to the cloud.
This is seen as an advantageous solution as it provides scalability on demand. Likewise, having advanced analytic capabilities at its fingertips enabled NatWest Markets to broaden its service offerings and automate key services to ensure more streamlined operation and improved customer service.
Conway added that conventional data warehousing can no longer handle the rapid growth of today’s financial scene, let alone run advanced analytics or allow for the rapid and cost-efficient scaling of operations. This flaw now hampers operations for a number of banks and investment houses. In this case, NatWest Markets is paving the way to a better way of doing things.
The company also invested in training over 1,000 employees in using the Google Cloud Platform over the past year. Of the group, nearly 100 are now Google Cloud-certified.
