WATCH | Investec moves to the cloud to ensure it stays ahead of the game

Financial services is a sector in flux. It’s a fast-paced and highly competitive industry, with new entrants such as fintechs evolving quickly and introducing new products and services. Established financial services providers need to be able to evolve and transform even more rapidly to stay relevant. 

Making the move to the cloud is increasingly becoming the answer for these businesses.

“The cloud offers the ability to move and adapt quickly,” says Graeme Lockley, head of IT Architecture and Engineering for Investec SA. It enables the innovation, efficiencies, workforce collaboration needed, and provides the resilience required to respond to market dynamics, business challenges and client needs.

That’s why global banking and wealth management group Investec has adopted a cloud-first strategy, leveraging Microsoft Cloud to harness its capabilities and benefits. The journey has involved building on the existing digital ecosystem that Investec has in place. The goal is to leverage the data and insights already generated from that ecosystem, without having to start from scratch, and employ other techniques to gain access to the data and unlock its value. 

Reducing time to market for industry-relevant solutions 

The decision was also driven by the opportunities the business saw when its London office rapidly developed and took a niche product to market, using a collection of cloud services to enable new client onboarding processes, security and a banking platform. 

The entire process took eight months as opposed to the typical 18-24 months, highlighting the cloud’s potential to accelerate innovation, deliver market-relevant solutions that meet changing client needs with agility and speed, as well as contain costs.

Investing in, and moving to, the cloud to harness these benefits has been a four-year journey for Investec so far — and the business has already experienced the value.

“A data-intensive solution saw a 43% reduction in costs, with the cloud offering a pay-as-you-use model that allows development teams to build and test solutions and applications on demand,” says Lockley.  

There has also been a significant performance improvement in the organisation and optimised processing of the substantial amount of data the business generates, handles and stores.

The business case for cloud

The business case for cloud continues to become more compelling as organisations find ways to leverage and extract its value, increasingly through three different phases of digital transformation, which are referred to by McKinsey as the Three Horizon Model for growth.   

“This framework gives businesses a way to approach growth and innovation by balancing the demands of the present through core systems with the needs of the future through new products and solutions,” says Ricardo Rosa, Enterprise Commercial director at Microsoft SA.

“It means accelerating investment beyond the building out of core systems to transforming at speed through customisable solutions, platforms and systems, and innovating at scale because of broad cultural transformation. This enables the ability to scale solutions rapidly in an environment with significant market pressures.”

For Investec, the ability to leverage this value equalled investing in capabilities to enable a complete application development and deployment environment in the cloud, enhance the ability to deliver applications and services rapidly, as well as streamline, optimise and extract value-adding insights from data.

These capabilities have been facilitated through Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and data engineering pipelines.

The heart of any digital journey: people

People are the key to making these capabilities work, however. Digital transformation and the use of technology to streamline business operations doesn’t mean people don’t need to be involved.

Businesses still need people to come up with new ideas, says Lockley, so they need to empower and enable people to deliver against these ideas. People still lie at the core of digital or cloud strategies: people build the solutions, and the solutions are built for people — it is simply about exploring ways to deliver change faster. 

“We know that the people we have are the people we need, so we have invested heavily in training and certification, and put learning objectives in place to ensure that all staff could become cloud, and in particular Azure, natives at their own pace.” 

Marrying the potential of people and the technological capabilities of the cloud to accelerate digital transformation, modernisation, innovation and resilience is still the start of the journey for Investec. 

“Retooling an organisation takes time, and what we have achieved so far is only the first part in a multi-act play that requires the right partner. We have a long-standing relationship with Microsoft and a high-level partnership that makes them more than just a technology provider. Our move to the cloud was a new endeavour for Investec, so we wanted a partner we knew we could trust and work with to walk the road with us,” says Lockley. 

The partners will continue to walk the journey and work together to solve industry-specific challenges — such as how to modernise onboarding and opening a bank account — to drive the business experience and efficiency for clients, while optimising operations and exploring opportunities in complementary and alternative markets.

To find out more about Investec’s journey to the cloud and the business value it has generated, watch this interview where Business Day TV’s Michael Avery speaks to Lockley and Charl Amin, FSI Business Development lead for Africa at Microsoft.

This article was paid for by Microsoft.