The past twelve months have accelerated the drive towards digital transformation for many organizations. As more businesses operate remotely and online transactions increase, financial services solution providers have experienced first-hand how infrastructure and agility can impact the ability to compete and thrive in this “new normal.” For many organizations, the pandemic marked a starting point for the digital transformation and modernization journey.
Cloud technology plays a significant role in digital transformation and modernization. It’s no longer an emerging trend but a critical component for payments companies and fintechs to quickly offer new products and services and remain competitive in a challenging landscape. The digital economy is growing rapidly, and the way consumers pay for things has changed.
As the pandemic created new opportunities to win customers, it also heightened the impetus to provide personalized, frictionless payment experiences. Quality integrations can speed time-to-market for organizations who are on a mission to expand to multiple markets or payment methods, and cloud technology is integral for managing data, analytics, compliance, and more. The cloud allows organizations to change the way payments are processed, with a focus on simplicity and efficiency, so that organizations can be more adaptive, connected, and innovative.
Why Cloud Is Integral to Payments Digital Transformation
As the demand for digital payments grows, financial services providers of all stripes will continue to seek out ways to automate payments and reduce compliance-related costs and barriers. Cloud technology plays a significant role in both, but it requires buy-in, investment, and prioritization from financial service providers.
While some organizations may face more significant hurdles to cloud adoption than others, the benefits remain clear. The transition to a cloud-based or hybrid payments ecosystem has many benefits for financial services providers, including faster processing, increased flexibility, and actionable insights.
Faster Processing
Cloud technology increases efficiency and the operational speed at which payments can be processed. Cloud-based payment platforms can, at times, be an order of magnitude faster than other methods. By minimizing server and hardware needed, cloud-based payment platforms can also reduce maintenance costs.
More Flexibility
Payments providers rely on scalability and flexibility, both of which can be hampered by traditional payments solutions. The cloud provides payments providers the opportunity to tap into products that are matched to their unique needs from a single integration. As those needs change, new solutions can be implemented without disrupting service.
Better Insights
Cloud technology can efficiently leverage data to offer valuable, actionable insights. Payment providers can aggregate and analyze data from multiple, disparate sources through one reporting tool that can yield actionable insights.
How Google Cloud is Driving Digital Transformation in Payments
Google Cloud offers a suite of Google technologies that can help improve payment processing and enhance the customer experience. Data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning allow payments organizations to bring new products and services to market faster. Financial services providers face steep competition, and many have turned to Google Cloud for modernization and innovation.
Analytics
Google Cloud offers a fully-managed, multi-cloud analytics platform that enables organizations to get actionable insights without the burden of scale and cost. Real-time insights and data apps can streamline decisions and fuel innovation. From data warehouse modernization to stream analytics, Google Cloud empowers financial services providers to scale the business and extract value from real-time data. Additional solutions include:
- Business Intelligence: Looker, an enterprise platform for business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics, facilitates data-driven experiences that lead to better outcomes
- Marketing Analytics: Google Cloud offers a complete set of advertising and analytics solutions to help organizations drive better marketing results through actionable insights.
- Cloud Data Fusion: This solution provides cloud-native and fully managed data integration at any scale, helping organizations avoid technical bottlenecks, boost productivity, and build with a data governance foundation.
AI/ML Processing Tools
By 2030, companies that fully absorb AI could double their cash flow, according to Mckinsey & Company. AI and ML tools can be used for automating low-complexity tasks so that human teams can focus on more complex activities that add value to the core business.
Google Cloud AI offers organizations end-to-end with prepackaged solutions to help solve their most pressing problems. AI building blocks and AutoML tools enable payments organizations to leverage the benefits of machine learning without added expertise. Organizations can choose from several different solutions to help them leverage advanced AI without putting a strain on internal resources:
- AI Platform: Data science and ML platform to build, deploy, and manage models.
- AI building blocks: Tools for adding sight, language, conversation, and structured data to applications.
- TensorFlow Enterprise: Enterprise-grade support and performance for AI workloads from the makers of Tensorflow.
For more information on how Opus can help you work with Google Cloud, contact us today.
