RBS floats idea of 'UK financial services cloud'

The UK financial industry is in dire need of a financial services cloud so that banks can take advantage of the technology and lessen the risks of adopting it.

That's according to Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS)'s Alan Grogan, chief analytics officer at RBS's customer services group, who thinks that the government or private enterprise should set up the cloud to kick start the move.

Talking to Computing, Grogan said banks want to go to the cloud because of the costs, benefits and deeper levels of security. However, at the same time they do not want to be the first one to do it.

He said that no bank will want to lead on it or push for it, because for something like payment infrastructure we would need a collective bringing together of organisations, and arguably sponsorship from our regulators and other parties.

Government help needed

Grogan said the way forward would be to put in place a UK financial services cloud and put all banks onto it. That way you would get all of the risk and security experts looking at partitions of the risk.

But he believes that over time banks will move to the cloud, and pointed out how the US healthcare's move to the cloud as a signal that it is possible because "that data is just as sensitive as financial services data."

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