Niamh Curran, reporter at Finextra Research, recaps her experience at last year’s conference and what she is looking forward to at this year’s event.

At Financial Cloud Summit 2023, Curran moderated the panel session on prioritising security withing cloud infrastructure. She highlights that strong foundational pillars of security from cloud providers are essential for a trusted relationship with their users, which is why it was so interesting to hear about various security models as the industry moved more towards a cloud base.

Touching on key themes of this year’s Financial Cloud Summit, Curran voices that despite inflation rates and other macroeconomic trends, the cloud market continues to grow year on year. “I think that really comes down to the fact that at this point, financial services have little choice about whether they’re going on the cloud. But they do have some options on how.

“I think that leads to one of the important points going into 2024, which is that the use cases are only going to continue to develop. One area I think will build more and more is the low/no code area of cloud. For startups and other more mature businesses this offers a really attractive option which they might struggle to do on their own.”

Curran continues that the increased prominence of embedded finance as well as growing use-cases for data, AI and generative AI are going to increase the use of cloud. Many companies are now focusing on machine learning and generative AI and how these can be used with sincerity this year. Yet while we have been seeing a growing interest in in these technologies, many companies have so far remained cautious over using them.

“I think that cautiousness will, and should, remain, but the use cases for generative AI and machine learning are becoming more apparent, including for some embedded finance products. I don’t know if this is 'the year' of full adoption of these technologies, but the investigations will take place. For generative AI and machine learning, they need a lot of data to run, and the only place that can hold that is the cloud. So even for an investigative stage, there will likely be an uptick in cloud usage for AI-linked technologies,” Curran concludes.

In terms of what she is looking most forward to at this year’s Financial Cloud Summit, Curran highlights: “There are some great panels to look forward to with some fantastic thought leaders. I think the optimise panel “Technical talent: how can the developer community be actively nurtured?” sounds really interesting. As cloud becomes more central to our banking infrastructure the focus on the talent is going to become so important, as it is in all sectors. Financial institutions should really be investing in those people who know what they’re doing in cloud, and who can build them a solid and secure infrastructure.”

Learn more about Finextra’s Financial Cloud Summit and register to attend here.