Indeed the financial sector has been slow to move to a cloud-based environment. Understandable concerns around data security are often cited as a key reason, but those financial institutions that do take the step towards financials cloud solutions like new accounting software quickly can expect to realize a number of huge business benefits.
Seven Main Benefits Of Migrating The Cloud Financials
Increased Cost Management and Transparency
Every, whether global or not, organization wants to be able to control costs, enjoy visibility regarding where spend is going, and be able to gauge return on investment. The cloud financial close solutions enable this sort of financial management.
Cost management is a key consideration in accounting when considering the cloud. Organizations are very adamant that they need to control, monitor, and budget costs as well as other assets. And a lot of the third-party and native cloud tools enable them to do this very easily and quickly. Assets including spend alerts can be put in place to ensure that you don’t get any nasty surprises at the end of the billing period.
Financial institutions are often attracted by the knowledge that payments are only made for what they are using. They can shut down environments that their organization is not using when they don’t need it and only pay for the portion of the time that they are operational. This helps Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) alike to plan business processes and management more effectively.
Cost transparency is one of the key assets and practices for CTOs. And as with the cloud, it can be more cost-effective. Cloud financial solutions and other accounting software can show a business case payback to that end and there are a lot of benefits to showing from an operating model perspective that technology can be delivered from a cost perspective in a more effective manner.
Faster Time to Market
CTOs at financial institutions are under extraordinary pressure to deliver implementations and other practices faster. Whether it’s in the cloud or on-premise, everyone wants implementations to happen instantaneously.
That’s where the cloud delivers a huge business advantage. For example, by using infrastructure as code as part of a cloud implementation, environments with fully working applications can be deployed within a couple of hours. In comparison to more traditional models, you could have been talking days or weeks to get a similar product implemented.
From an agility standpoint, because the cloud is built for the digital marketplace, it’s possible to deliver in shorter time frames and deploy technology more quickly. The cloud, as a product, can also enable a development-security-operations-type model to enable organizations to deliver their own security software on the platform.
With financial cloud solutions, organizations can establish enterprise-approved and repeatable patterns for delivering, which are well suited for a very scalable environment.
Can Support Stability
Stability is another key consideration for FIs looking to operate in the cloud. Regardless of the platform, they run on, stability is essential. In the cloud, stability means reliability; FIs can rest assured that in the event of a problem in one location, operations can quickly come back. Additionally, they have business continuity as other servers in the cloud will act as backup. CTOs can also add new functionality without disruption to their normal practices.
Can Support Scalability
Stability is another key consideration for FIs looking to operate in a financial cloud solution. Regardless of the platform, they run on, stability is essential. In the cloud, stability means reliability; FIs can rest assured that in the event of a problem in one location, they have business continuity as other servers in the cloud will act as backup. CTOs can also add new functionality without disruption.
Simpler Integration
Most cloud-based systems have a “common architecture” that makes it easier to share data and achieve integration across applications. For example, cloud-based financial solutions can be much more easily integrated with order and shopping cart software, warehouse management software, enterprise ERPs, and so on. This cuts down on human error and streamlines processes.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery Support
Financial institutions’ reputations rely on 24/7/365 reliability. There’s no downtime, so high availability and disaster recovery are critical. Both are easy to achieve at a relatively inexpensive cost with cloud technology.
Makes Collaboration Practices Easy
Compiling financial reports for the resident accountant can be challenging, hence using a cloud-based financial solution is a good option for businesses who want to eliminate any risks.
Because the system and along with all financial information is hosted in the cloud, it can be accessed from anywhere and a business leader can set up access for the accountant so they can log into the software as needed. FIs can also control the amount of access they give their employees.
Software Improves Accuracy
When all financial information is stored in the same place and FIs can enter the necessary information into the system they are using regularly. It lowers the risk of costly accounting and other payments errors.
The most cloud-based financial solution is easy to use. It lets FIs enter expenses and income as needed, and allows them to categorize all of your transactions. This way, every time there is a report or financial review, FIs can quickly know the information their staff is looking at is correct in real-time.
It is secured and safe
At the end of the day, this is for you and your board to decide. First, look at some of the advantages that cloud-based services can bring to the financial sector. Many practices, such as sales as well as marketing and more can be achieved without needing particularly high security.
With the right hybrid cloud set up, it’s possible to offer customers the digital services they have come to expect from big corporations, without compromising their security. Digital transformation is one of the assets that are definitely here to stay, and customer expectations are only due to increase.
This means there should be no need to avoid the use of Oracle ERP cloud services.
Why is it important to have?
The financial sector businesses have to fight when they ought to be relevant in today’s business transformation. They hold a major global market. But they face steep competition from both the legacy technology and other technologies that are still upcoming.
Business leaders are faced with daily challenges wherein they have decided whether the given technology will be incubating their operations or giving revenue goals. Cloud-based solutions, as a product, assist in alleviating the challenges that come with large scale digital transformation with avoiding redundancy that might occur in-demand sectors of live data. The expectation of being more efficient delivers consumer-centric services together with an influx of new competitions that are focusing on larger consumer segments with easier options.
Cloud-based services are known to be driving operational efficiency and significantly decrease the costs of running any business. With financial services, the journey to the cloud has been more complicated than for other industries for several reasons. There are risk management and security concerns being some of them. Nonetheless, the evolution of IT infrastructure is underway and financial services companies are aggressively exploring opportunities.
Cloud computing technology has significantly changed the way businesses functions; it makes analytics easy for a business and increases access to technology. All small enterprises to large enterprises are adopting some form of cloud technology that gives their business strategy. For businesses to move beyond, they will need to detail their requirements and strategies for the cloud software.
Are you ready to explore the benefits of the oracle fusion of financial cloud solutions and IT services at your financial institution? Get in touch with Lumos to see how we could help.
