Cloud-computing has become a critical component of every machine learning technology. Banking institutions, regulators, and supervising schemes have introduced guidelines to encourage the use of cloud services and relinquish accountability for outsourced services.
Migration from traditional data centers to cloud might seem discouraging with serious challenges during migration ranging from lack of control to servers down-time. The global payments industry and banking institutions realized the potential of Platform as a Service (PaaS) & Software as a Service (SaaS), in which resources are provided as general utilities that can be leased through IoT on-demand and in real-time.
In this knowledge piece, we’re aiming to idealize the opportunity presented by Platform as a Service in order to leverage Banking as a Service (BaaS). Leveraging cloud services represents a shift in operating models and a shift in management attitudes, as more banking institutions are realizing the flexibility, scalability and agility offered by cloud-service providers. Cloud migration should be taken as an informed decision, the question whether to build in-house servers or consider a third party provider is to be addressed below.
Comparing impact of change between in-house servers & cloud service providers.
Reduced Payment Infrastructure Upgrades
PaaS dramatically lowers the cost of migrating to the cloud; it can provide immediate access, in real-time, to hardware resources with no upfront capital investment for users. This leads to a faster time-to-market and allows access to data analytics and data capabilities as consumer touch-points are growing indefinitely. PaaS treats IT infrastructure as an operational expense OpEx, compared to Capital expense such as in-house cloud servers.
Resilience & Scalability
Many server down-time issues have been out into the spotlight during in-house cloud migration; this is often caused by varying peeks and thorough puts imposed by volumes. PaaS offers the flexibility to scale up the infrastructure for these peaks without having to integrate or upgrade in-house servers with costly redundant capacity. The goal of PaaS is to scale resources up or down dynamically through software standardized APIs depending on client’s load.
Agility
Incumbent banks are revamping their business model to remain competitive in a market open to non-banking institutions such as fintechs and emerging challenger banks. Years of adding IT layers to existing legacy systems has made cloud transformation even more stagnant and complex, making it difficult to keep up with demand and time-consuming to deploy payment solutions to their consumers. Managing an in-house private cloud is subject to the same traditional IT infrastructure failure, as constant upgrades and requirements are imposed by regulatory authorities & payment schemes. PaaS offered by hybrid clouds will transform your banking services through faster deployment of innovative payment solutions, saving more time and resources for banking institutions to focus on added-value task such as marketing, change management and value chain distribution. Thus, PaaS allows banks to acquire quicker insights, deploy products/services faster, and greater risk management as the cloud-service provider acts as your only point of contact for cloud-services hosting.
Altpay: Digital Commerce Gateway Creates Payment Ecosystem of the Future
Altpay Digital Commerce Gateway is a cloud-based end-to-end payment ecosystem. With machine learning mechanisms and data capabilities, our clients can focus on their new innovative payment solutions, while remaining customer-centric and agile.
- Real-Time Payments: A standardized API-enabled cloud native payment hub supports all global payment processing and payment acceptance on the smart android POS or in-app purchases of acquiring banks.
- Loyalty Management: The digital commerce gateway is accompanied with loyalty management for merchants, issuing banks, acquiring banks, and schemes to offer loyalty programs.
- Secure & Flexible Cloud-Computing: Altpay digital commerce gateway offers PCI-DSS 3.2X certified cloud-computing services, with the ability to scale your payment service offerings to multiple devices and with the convenience of a smartphone app.
- Biometric Payments: With the world concerned about identity theft, Altpay enables biometric payments; its smart android POS terminals are carried with state-of-the-art biometric technology such as facial recognition & fingerprints. Data is securely encoded and only authorized parties have access.
- Interoperability: Altpay enables cloud on-boarding in which banks that have to adhere to in-house server policies can swap or re-use cloud components such as data, applications, and infrastructure while keeping the same level of interoperability with Altpay cloud servers.