Swami said instead of “jumping” onto the cloud, FIs need to have a very clear and proper strategy for the sake of regulatory compliance.

“I have seen in the last three or four years that FIs started jumping on the cloud without having a proper strategy,  and now they're realising that it resulted in its own problem,” he explained.

Harmon, vice-president and global head of financial services at Red Hat said they are helping customers to modernise.  "If you do application modernisation it starts to reduce that legacy authentication," he said.

They both see massive transformations in financial services. As banks and companies continue to collect and process huge amounts of data, the architecture is going to shift to a more data-centric form rather than remain application-centric. As regulators continue to demand transparency, this will find a compelling use case in compliance and sanctions screening. Swami said the only way you can have transparency is through new data.