IDC and Red Hat are hosting a webinar called Financial Services Spotlight: Openness, Regulation and Flexibility looking at open, hybrid cloud strategies in the Nordic & Benelux FSI sector

"From the frying pan into the fire" accurately describes today's vortex of change, risk and uncertainty compared to pre-pandemic times. As if the transformation pressure on financial institutions was not already high before the pandemic struck, but today the industry finds itself firefighting on multiple fronts.

Adapting to the future of work and war for talent; a new wave of regulations from operational resiliency, anti-money laundering, sanctions to ESG; widespread economic uncertainty spanning from inflation, supply chain shortages and credit defaults; and not to forget the necessity to diversify business models, unlock the power of the connected ecosystem, accelerate in the digitalization marathon, while getting a get a grip on operating cost and futureproofing IT and operations for the digital era. Where to even begin?

A strong house is built on a solid foundation and the same goes for any financial institution. It depends on a foundation that provides the much-needed scalability, flexibility, openness, agility and reliability to weather the storm.

This can mean many different things to different organizations, but IDC data shows that this means increasingly a shift towards open, hybrid cloud strategies in the European FSI sector.

A hybrid strategy provides the optimal balance between resilience, performance, openness, control and innovativeness to succeed in an increasingly digital world. But it also forces organizations to get a handle on the growing complexity and cost to stay in control.

On Monday, September 26th, please join us for this webinar together with our partner Red Hat, to discuss the following topics:

       Unleash the power of the ecosystem: Open banking only marked a first milestone on the journey to an open and embedded finance ecosystem. Moving forward, financial institutions need to move closer to their customers, which means they need to be where the customers are. This requires a fundamental rethinking of channel strategies, as APIs increasingly become the window front for a FSI's products and services, as well as a more open approach to partner and consume services from the ecosystem of traditional ISVs, fintechs, and platforms.

Questions to be discussed: What is the status of embedded finance today? What are the biggest opportunities today? Where are open finance initiatives failing/ struggling? What will be the next milestone?

       The new operational resiliency mandate: With the Digital Operational Resiliency Act (DORA) on the horizon, financial institutions need to revisit their capabilities in cybersecurity, incident reporting, third party risk management and information sharing. On the positive side, the new regulation also brings services providers under the regulatory umbrella, which marks a sea change in the regulatory approach.

Questions to be discussed: What is the impact of DORA on my operations? What can I do to prepare for DORA? What are the benefits/ opportunities that DORA brings to the market?

       Futureproofing infrastructure management for the digital era: The cloud without doubt transforms financial services fundamentally and has become a critical component of the infrastructure strategy. Managing, orchestrating and optimizing cloud resources is moving into focus, as more workloads are virtualized.

Questions to be discussed: What are the best practices in cloud management today? Where are organizations still struggling? How will an open hybrid cloud strategy help to balance the needs of business, IT and risk?

Join IDC and Red Hat on September 26th to be inspired and learn more about this interesting and relevant topic!