Traditional banks have been very hesitant to embrace the opportunities afforded by operating in the cloud. Security concerns, often unfounded, make the public cloud a particular point of fear for most traditional financial institutions, despite the many benefits it offers in terms of efficiency, scalability, and innovation. As a result, banks are pouring significant resources into building their own private cloud solutions.

However, the private cloud model, when taking the total solution in aggregate, misses out on the main advantages of cloud itself when considering 3 major concerns. First, the isolation of the private cloud model severely limits the cost efficiencies that can only be realized with the global economies of scale enabled by the public cloud. Second, implementation, switching, and maintenance costs of the underlying private cloud infrastructure will often completely erode any marginal efficiency gains realized by operating in a private cloud. Third, and most importantly, private cloud infrastructure can never keep up with the pace of innovation that the public cloud is offering. Sadly, if large banks ever actually complete their private cloud model, they will immediately be 5 years behind the industry on new cloud capabilities, especially when compared to what innovative fin-tech startup competitors can do with the public cloud.

Moven, on the other hand, has no legacy concerns to worry about and is able to fully leverage public cloud economies of scale and innovation. In fact, Moven is leveraging Amazon’s public cloud to enable its “smart bank account” distribution model across the globe, most recently with TD Bank Canada and Westpac New Zealand. Because of this, Moven bypasses many of the restrictions big banks encounter with the private cloud, enabling unprecedented global expansion of innovative business capabilities, while being even more secure than a private data center or private cloud model.

In fact, Moven is not just leveraging Amazon’s public cloud to “host infrastructure”, but has built a proprietary technology on top of AWS’s “Infrastructure as Code” capabilities, dubbed the Moven Global Distributor (MGD). The MGD has enabled Moven to take the Agile method to the extreme with advanced continuous delivery, radical development efficiency, and ultra-high quality environment management.  As an example, Moven is able to deploy an entire enterprise financial wellness and banking stack to any AWS-enabled country in a matter of hours, something that would take a large bank over a year to complete, while supporting a globally replicated multi-tenant model that segments client data in each country but still enforces a re-usable model across clients.