Just a few years ago, the idea of major financial services companies partnering with cloud providers would have been laughable.

Now, the finance sector is adopting cloud computing services as fast as possible. What has changed?

“Customers are looking for personalized services, instant gratification, the ability to interact, where they want and when they want,” said Yolande Piazza (pictured, left), vice president of financial services at Google Cloud. “[They] want to be a segmentation of one. They don’t want to be forced to fit into the traditional banking ecosystems.”

Piazza and Zac Maufe (pictured, right), managing director of global financial services solutions at Google Cloud, spoke with David Nicholson, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation on cloud adoption in the financial services sector.

Finance sector discovers the benefits of cloud

While technology is unleashing a new model for the financial services industry, the move from 100% on-premises to a hybrid cloud model with multiple cloud providers “couldn’t and shouldn’t be done alone,” according to Piazza.

Wells Fargo, HSBC Holdings and The Bank of Nova Scotia, aka Scotiabank, are three of the financial behemoths that have partnered with Google as they move into the complex world of cloud. Interestingly, they’re choosing flexible strategies and refusing to be tied to one cloud vendor.

“Wells [Fargo] announced it’s taking a multicloud approach to its digital infrastructure strategy, leveraging both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure,” said Piazza, adding that multicloud is a common approach for Google’s customers.

“At Google, we’ve always said that we support open multi and hybrid cloud strategies because we believe our customers should be able to run what they want, where they want it,” she said, echoing a key them of Google Cloud Next. “And that was exactly the philosophy that Wells [Fargo] took.”

Once companies have made the switch from on-premises to a cloud platform, they discover new business cases for the technology, according to Maufe.

“A lot of that for us is around the data, artificial intelligence and machine learning space,” he said. “We see that being the way to unlock huge amounts of value.”

Being part of financial services in 2021 is a completely different world, according to Piazza said.

“The conversations are fun and refreshing, and you can start to see how we have the ability to partner to change the landscape across all of the different financial services industries,” she said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s coverage of Google Cloud Next ’21 and one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: SiliconANGLE