French bank Societe Generale is working with Microsoft and Amazon to become one of the first large European banks to adopt cloud computing for the bulk of its operations, as reported by Bloomberg.
According to the report, the bank will start using external cloud services by June for some non-client content, such as financial research and marketing data. By 2020, the bank intends to have 80% of its infrastructure on internal and external cloud networks.
“We are ready to go to scale,” said Carlos Goncalves, the bank’s head of global technology services. “According to the European Central Bank, we have put in place the benchmark for the industry.”
Speaking to The Record last autumn, Microsoft’s chief technology officer for financial services, Sean Foley, said that in the last 12 months or so his company has seen a massive shift in the number of banks adopting cloud.
“They’re looking to the cloud for things like significantly speeding up product development, and a lot of banks are taking advantage of areas like risk modelling,” he said.
Societe Generale is thought to be one of the first large financial firms in Europe that is preparing to shift the majority of its operations to the cloud.
Bloomberg reports that Societe Generale’s developers and engineers from Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services have been running pilot programmes for more than a year to test the security and reliability of the public cloud.
“Our work with some banks shows that up to 80% of their applications are movable to public cloud,” said Foley. “Now that a lot of the largest banks have begun to embrace it, we'll see a trickle-down effect.”