IBM Cloud: View on the Financial Regulatory Landscape

Today, financial services providers are faced with an array of challenges in attempting to keep up with an ever-changing regulatory environment, all the while striving to stay at the cutting edge of market trends, customer demands, innovation, data protection and more.

We speak to Alan Peacock, GM at IBM Cloud, on what financial services providers can do to remain compliant while staying at the forefront of innovation. 

IBM: New tech fuelling a rapidly changing regulatory landscape 

For Alan, financial services providers must be prepared to navigate geography-specific requirements if they hope to remain compliant. This includes the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), and proposed laws, such as the European Union Cybersecurity Scheme for Cloud Services (EUCS), all while staying competitive with the rapidly growing stores of data associated with deploying AI.

While AI will fuel significant business innovations, it requires strategic considerations around where data resides, data privacy and more. 

Alan says: “Within the past few years, we have also seen regulators take a closer look at cloud usage – especially around cloud concentration risk in the European Union. 

“Moves like this indicate that regulators are paying closer attention to the evolving threat landscape and are keen to minimise risk and close gaps in the supply chain. 

“It has become increasingly clear that ensuring a secure hybrid, multi-cloud environment is more important than ever.”

A Sovereign cloud approach – the way forward

To protect critical business services across hybrid multi-cloud environments, Alan believes adopting a sovereign cloud approach is vital. “This is a cloud operating model designed to help organisations meet their legal, regulatory and operational requirements in a given jurisdiction, and can ensure that financial institutions keep data secured while staying ahead of geographic requirements.

“Sovereign cloud also offers businesses the ability to exercise control, make decisions and enforce legal and regulatory obligations related to data – regardless of its physical location,” he continues. 

“As banks and other financial institutions make their IT decisions, it’s critical that they look to cloud providers that offer the flexibility of choosing the country or regions where they want to build and host their workloads.”

What’s more, Alan says that leveraging industry-specific clouds further enables enterprises in all regulated industries to balance innovation and prioritise compliance.

“Financial institutions require an enterprise-grade platform with built-in security and controls to help them manage mission-critical workloads,” he says. 

“By automating these controls, enterprises can focus more on driving real business outcomes. For example, IBM Cloud for Financial Services was built with the highest set of regulatory and compliance standards informed by the IBM Financial Services Cloud Council - a network of CIOs, CTOs, CISOs and Risk & Compliance officers from over 100 global financial institutions who are working together to drive the strategy and evolution of cloud security.”

Today, IBM’s enterprise-grade platform is optimised to help organisations in highly regulated industries – including financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, government and more – manage mission-critical workloads while prioritising resiliency, performance, security, compliance and total cost of ownership. 

Alan concludes: “Ultimately, while regulations can be challenging to navigate, they should be viewed as essential for driving secured innovation. 

“Many, if not all, requirements around data are designed to ensure consumers and enterprises are confident that their data is protected at all times. To build trust and transparency – it takes all of us across regulators, cloud providers and enterprises to come together.”

Earlier this week, we looked at what makes IBM one of the leading banking technology firms in 2024. 

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