For many rural banks today, having physical servers in their branches or head office is a burden. This reality imposes heavy demands and costs on an organisation, from the need for constant support in the bank’s remote locations by the IT team, to extensive staff training and, the biggest pain of all, significant spending on both direct and indirect hidden costs.  Reducing costs might mean you need to decide whether the time has come for your core banking platform to transition to the cloud. Financial institutions around the world are making this transition, so rural banks have plenty of peers from which to find success stories and advice from people who have already gone through the process. 

The right engine for the right vehicle

One piece of advice Oradian can offer, thanks to over a decade of experience moving financial providers to the cloud, is to choose wisely. Technology providers come in all shapes and sizes, and many of them are not very transparent with costs and hidden pitfalls.  If you had a sophisticated  Mercedes engine, would you put it in the old  Jeep you already have, just because it might seem cheaper and more convenient? Would you expect it to perform as a proper vehicle, to take you safely and comfortably to your destination? Are you prepared to call the towing service and pay for the mechanics on every second trip?  Would your passengers take a second trip with you again once they’ve been stuck on the scorching tarmac, waiting for the tow truck?  Visionary, smart bank leaders understand the importance of reliable infrastructure that always performs – so reliable in fact, you and your IT team sometimes forget it exists, allowing you to focus on your business.  Many low-cost core banking providers claim that they can transition you to a cloud system just by relying on Amazon’s off-the-shelf IT infrastructure, but the reality is a minefield. Choosing the wrong provider is a costly mistake. 

Making the right decision

You might think a platform, no matter how advanced its software, services and algorithms are, needs to run on computer servers, but there are in fact three possible ways to run your IT systems, each with its associated costs. A rural bank can have its hardware systems: 

• On-premise in all of their branches, and a central system physically in the HQ. 
• Leased/hosted completely on Amazon AWS or similar providers. 
• Provided on the cloud with no physical server infrastructure by a trusted core banking system provider, with all costs included in the price of the service.

If you’re interested in discovering how Oradian’s cloud-based core banking system can unlock growth for your business, get in touch with one of our business intelligence experts for a free overview of the Oradian system.