“*Scalability*:
SaaS leverages the elasticity of the cloud to provide tremendous scalability that financial services who cater to a rapidly growing number of customers can scale quickly. This increase in scalability comes at a fraction of the cost required to scale manually i.e. purchasing additional servers and networking.
*Flexibility*:
Financial needs change rapidly and financial services need to keep up with the changing landscape. Whether it's offering new, specialized services or scrapping old ones, making rapid changes to tech stacks without disrupting service delivery is tough with traditional in-house servers. SaaS providers usually maintain the latest updates of software and changes can be implemented while the service is still running.
*IT cost*:
For financial services with global operations, IT costs take up a sizable chunk of their budget. And the more customers they acquire, the more they have to spend in terms of server space, networking, and security. However, with SaaS leveraging the global network of major cloud service providers, financial services can slash their IT costs considerably.
For one, they could use a global network of CDNs to store location-specific content close to the target recipient, reducing latency. They could also leverage load balancers to route and spread traffic to specific VMs or other resources to increase efficiency.
*Security*:
Major cloud providers take up the responsibility of securing the cloud environment as a whole, although protection of the company’s VPC network within the cloud environment ultimately falls to the organization. This is still a much better option compared to the cost of security for the entire tech stack, especially on a global scale.
Also, financial services can implement granular security, identity management policies, and firewall rules across their entire network.
*Risk management:*
Financial services can leverage SaaS to implement more robust risk management and compliance policies in regard to client data and sensitive information. An example is using cloud redundancy to reduce the risk of information loss.
*Customer experience*:
The ability to cache content in several regions, utilize automatic failovers, and leverage redundancies sets the stage for smooth user experience.
Ultimately, SaaS offers the financial service industry the tools it needs to keep up with the global shift that’s currently happening in the world of business.”
- Bowen Khong, Founder & Head of Research at ForexToStocks