Singapore is quickly becoming a leading financial hub, exploiting many technological advancements like the cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In 2023, the Singapore government launched the Singapore National AI Strategy 2.0, highlighting its commitment to leading global AI innovation. As digital innovations dot the South Asian banking landscape, cloud-native finance becomes essential for staying competitive and agile.
Overview of Cloud-native Finance
A cloud-native mindset enables finance companies to build, deploy, and run software applications on cloud stacks. Unlike traditional on-premises systems, which are architecturally rigid and challenging to scale and integrate, cloud-native systems and applications enable computing resources to be dynamic, scalable, reliable, and adept at providing the necessary functionality to keep up with the increasing demands of the evolving business landscape.
- Faster releases via agile methodologies: Cloud-native technologies enable financial organizations to develop and operate scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments. By leveraging cloud-native principles such as microservices, containers, and CI/CD pipelines, organizations can reduce time-to-market, enhance product iterations, and deliver continuous updates to meet customer demands.
- Lower downtime due to microservices: Cloud-native tools can dramatically lower application downtime when combined with microservices. Financial companies can update, scale, or troubleshoot individual services without disrupting the entire application by enabling independent deployment and management of application components. This decentralized approach ensures the system operates normally, even if one component encounters an issue.
- Automated deployments via containers: Cloud-native tools can also automate deployments and enable continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. By encapsulating applications and their dependencies into a standardized unit that can run consistently across different environments, containers ensure financial applications behave the same way, minimizing errors and ensuring faster and more reliable application delivery.
Why Companies in Singapore Should Enable Cloud-native Finance
Financial organizations in Singapore are increasingly adopting cloud computing to run their business operations. Revenue in the Singapore public cloud market is projected to reach $7.4 billion by the end of 2024. Yet despite these statistics, the overall number of assets deployed in the cloud is paltry: the average organization has only migrated 50% of its production workloads. Risk, regulatory, security, and data protection requirements all delay these desired transformations.
Adopting a cloud-native mindset can be life-changing for financial services companies in Singapore. It can help them maximize computing power and bring innovations to market faster with less risk. Let’s look at the top reasons why companies in Singapore should embrace cloud-native finance:
- Increasing competition: Financial services organizations in Singapore face extreme competitive pressures from new-age FinTech firms that don’t need to support decades of existing, often legacy technologies. Investing in cloud-native infrastructure like Atlassian can enable them to tackle competition by rolling out software updates quickly, developing new digital services and features on the fly, and leveraging AI to build their open banking ecosystems.
- New rules and regulations: Financial companies in Singapore must comply with an evolving set of industry-specific rules and frameworks. A cloud-native approach makes it easy for companies to configure and deploy applications that meet the higher-level mandates of these regulations. With features like automated monitoring, logging, and encryption, cloud-native solutions ensure that sensitive financial data is secure and traceable, making it easier for financial institutions to demonstrate compliance during audits.
- Newer business models: Financial companies in Singapore are witnessing a tectonic shift in their business and operating models. As automation, blockchain, and product gamification become increasingly common, cloud-native finance increases the agility with which firms can adapt to these new trends. Cloud-native solutions enable banks and other financial institutions to automate workflows, communicate in real-time, and consistently and quickly integrate new trends.
- Downtime costs: Downtime can dearly cost financial services companies. Leveraging cloud-native compute, storage, network, and data services can enable companies in Singapore to utilize redundancy capabilities such as availability zones (AZ). Designed to be isolated from other zones’ failures, each zone provides inexpensive, low-latency network connectivity with AZ failover so that database operations can resume as quickly as possible without administrative intervention.
- Growth of AI: Keeping up with the pace of AI innovations has become essential for finance companies in Singapore, or risk being left behind. Cloud-native finance allows these companies to have seamless access to continuous innovation. From new features to integrations and extensibility, cloud-native finance ensures companies have the latest capabilities to integrate AI into their products and ship new features with speed and quality.
Real-World Use Case
Zafin, a leading provider of product and pricing control solutions that help banks manage conduct risk, faced multiple challenges. From products reaching end-of-life to a lack of standardization in software development, it encountered many problems in running its business efficiently.
After conducting a thorough analysis of existing processes in various departments, enreap helped Zafin move from a 10-year-old legacy on-premises server to the latest version of Atlassian cloud and drive maximum. Since all users now use a typical cloud instance across the organization, Zafin can improve cross-functional efficiency, maintain uniformity across multiple teams, and standardize project management.
With the digital banking revolution happening in Singapore, the buzz around cloud-native finance is picking up immense steam. HCLTech, for example, is creating a new Singapore-based AI/Cloud Native Lab that will help companies develop blueprints for AI and GenAI-led efficiencies.
Maximize the Power of the Cloud with enreap and Atlassian
Modern cloud-native technologies can equip companies in Singapore with the flexibility they need to scale products and services, ensure high availability and performance, and facilitate the onboarding of new users.
If you are looking to strengthen your stance in the competitive South Asian market while also spreading wings beyond local borders, we can help! As a trusted AWS partner and an Atlassian Platinum solution partner in Southeast Asia, we can help you keep up with the region’s rapid digital transformation and maximize the power of the cloud.
