Wipro helps banks push more workloads to the cloud

The pressure on banking and financial services (BFS) firms continues to mount. Traditional banks know they must embrace front-to-back digital, but that’s easier said than done. Decades of playing catch-up with failed and piecemeal transformation efforts have resulted in fragmented technology landscapes, which, combined with the challenging regulatory environment and current macroeconomic headwinds, prove a sizable roadblock for any real transformation.

In response, hyperscalers are getting “industry religion”—partnering and coming to market with financial services cloud offerings to help banks move more workloads to the cloud. HFS recently attended Wipro’s “Innovation Experience for Financial Services” event, where Wipro unveiled its partnership with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and outlined four new offerings designed to help BFS firms make cloud-enabled digital progress.

Wipro, in partnership with Microsoft, developed four new solutions built on Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

Throughout the event, we heard perspectives from Wipro and Microsoft executives on the industry and its challenges. Everybody agrees that banks want to modernize their core and move data and apps to the cloud, but it’s time-consuming, expensive, and brings with it a catalog of risks and regulatory challenges. For evidence, just look at TSB, fined £48.65 million for “operational resilience failings,” including its IT upgrade program. For Wipro and Microsoft, that means a shared goal of de-risking cloud transformation, which they believe will help unlock the cloud for financial services.

To achieve its goal of de-risking cloud transformation, Wipro developed four solutions on the Microsoft Cloud:

• Core Banking Transformation: Bringing together capabilities and methodologies to suit each client, Wipro’s core banking offering helps banks modernize their core to reduce costs, enable faster go-to-market, and adopt innovative technologies. The offering includes hollowing the bank’s existing core, moving parts of it to cloud-native platforms, and replacing the entire legacy core banking platform with cloud-native counterparts.
• Intelligent Volume Optimization and Risk Management (IVOR): Developed to combat manual-labor-intensive anti-money laundering (AML) practices thanks to repeated false alarms, IVOR leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to complement AML systems, helping them adapt to customer behavior. Wipro claims this enables a 60% reduction in false positives.
• NetOxygen: A loan origination system, NetOxygen leverages the likes of OCR to deliver an automated and flexible offering Wipro believes will help clients increase their loan origination volumes and improve customer and employee experiences. NetOxygen is an existing Wipro platform optimized for Microsoft Cloud.
• FinOps: FinOps is Wipro’s cloud operations and management solution. It brings insights and analysis of cloud transformation datasets, complemented by advisory services from Wipro’s practitioners.

Accompanying the new offerings was the announcement that enterprises can explore the solutions in an “immersive 3D environment.” Wipro explained this would allow clients to look at the solutions virtually rather than traveling to Wipro’s offices, although we’re not sure what that will look like in action.

In a sea of cloud partnerships, what’s exciting about this one?

HFS thinks that, at this point, industry clouds are mostly marketing; we’ve already written about the need to navigate cloud capabilities by value, not brand. Every enterprise should ask what is industry specific about any so-called industry cloud. As HFS has written, the answer for Microsoft and its financial services cloud is Microsoft software solutions designed for BFS plus an industry-specific data model. Microsoft and the other hyperscalers need service provider partners like Wipro to bring their deep industry expertise and additional BFS solutions to run in the hyperscalers’ financial services clouds.

In the case of the offerings from Wipro, the provider has built both new and optimized existing offerings to run in the Microsoft Cloud, leveraging its deep experience in providing IT and business process services to banks. While the offerings align with many top areas of need for banks, HFS views them as a mixed bag of “now with cloud” and horizontal cloud solutions optimized for banking—useful but not differentiated.

The differentiation is likely more tied to Wipro’s expanded BFS consulting and strategy expertise from its 2021 acquisition of Capco. Now fully integrated, Wipro flexes its domain expertise to win joint clients with Capco and nurture a healthy deal pipeline. More importantly, it’s a wealth of expertise Wipro can lean on while delivering this latest set of solutions with Microsoft.

The Bottom Line: BFS firms looking for industry cloud are overwhelmed with options—but the Wipro+Capco combination could offer an edge.

All industries are moving to the cloud: private, public, hybrid, and most certainly multi. The clouds are not significantly, or at least consistently, industry specific. True industry specificity is in the expertise and deep domain knowledge of the data and applications being moved to the cloud. Here, the combined Wipro and Capco BFS expertise is critical; the firm brings horizontal cloud expertise plus deep industry expertise. Beyond the “immersive 3D environment,” the secret sauce for driving real value is its domain expertise, which BFS firms should be looking for.