Pushing its sweeping co-creation model with global banks to new levels, IBM has launched a new framework in partnership with 70 banks around the world to help banks not only become more secure, compliant, and resilient but also boost performance.
While the idea of customer-advisory boards is not new, IBM Cloud for Financial Services has ratcheted up the engagement from “you advise and we’ll listen” to full co-creation status in which participating banks share hard-earned intelligence and explore next practices that will reshape the entire industry.
The IBM Cloud for Financial Services Framework is one of those flywheel-type undertakings (thank you Jim Collins and Good to Great for the flywheel model) that begins as an evangelical concept, attracts a few followers and then a few more, and at some point blossoms into a high-impact trend with plenty of escape velocity.
And as (a) modern cloud technology pervades every aspect of modern business and (b) industry-specific solutions become not just spiffy add-ons but essential ingredients for success in the acceleration economy, I believe this co-creation model evangelized for the past three years by IBM will become something of a standard across multiple industries.
Positing that “collective intelligence aims to reduce financial-services risk” for everyone involved, IBM makes a compelling case that its new cybersecurity and risk-mitigation framework has been designed by global banks for global banks.
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this initiative has been driven by someone with a staunchly customer-oriented perspective: IBM Cloud head Howard Boville, who before joining IBM three years ago was CTO at Bank of America.
More on Boville in a moment, but first here’s the overview from the IBM press release:
“Designed specifically for financial regulated industries, IBM Cloud for Financial Services was introduced in 2019 in collaboration with partner banks including Bank of America and BNP Paribas. It aims to help financial services organizations address the industry’s unique cybersecurity, regulatory and operational requirements, while providing the benefits and flexibility of the cloud in a secured environment.
“Leveraging the collective intelligence of the IBM Financial Services Cloud Council — a network of more than 120 financial services CIOs, CTOs, and Risk and Compliance officers such as Banco Bradesco, Nationwide, Banco Sabadell, Virgin Money and MUFG – the platform includes industry-informed and built-in controls that can help financial institutions meet their security and compliance requirements of this highly regulated industry. These industry-informed controls are not IBM’s — they are the industry’s collective controls. While IBM Cloud has implemented these controls as part of IBM Cloud for Financial Services, it has also made them available for clients to use on multiple clouds (public or private) — through managing workloads with IBM Cloud Satellite and monitoring their compliance through the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center.”
I generally refrain from posting long excerpts from press releases but felt this one very effectively captures the essence of a massively important new trend in the business world: the deeply collaborative co-creation of new products and services across customers and suppliers in a fashion that goes far beyond advisory boards. And I certainly have nothing against advisory boards — if the input given is rapidly funneled into action, that’s a great outcome.
But co-creation goes far beyond that to the genesis of new ideas, new processes, and ultimately new revenue streams that neither party — customer nor vendor — could likely have developed and brought to market on its own.
And in this IBM press release, you can see the new spirit of openness come through clearly:
- “…introduced in 2019 in collaboration with partner banks…”
- “…the collective intelligence of the IBM Financial Services Cloud Council…”
- “…These industry-informed controls are not IBM’s – they are the industry’s collective controls…” and
- “…also made them available for clients to use on multiple clouds (public or private)….”
In the press release, IBM senior VP and head of cloud platform Boville, the former Bank of America CTO I mentioned above and the person who’s been driving this co-creation initiative for the past three years, emphasized the inclusion of all those cybersecurity and compliance and governance capabilities into the IBM Cloud for Financial Services, which means customers don’t have to spend hundreds of millions of even billions of dollars every year trying to keep up with all those requirements on their own.
“As organizations strive to keep up with the latest regulatory requirements and evolving data sovereignty laws, security and compliance are at the core of our approach,” Boville said.
“IBM Cloud for Financial Services is specifically designed for highly regulated workloads, allowing financial services and other regulated industries to host applications and workloads in the cloud with confidence while addressing third and fourth party risk throughout their supply chains.”
IBM also revealed that it has begun working closely with a not-for-profit group called the Cloud Security Alliance, which is “dedicated to defining standards, certifications, and best practices to help ensure secured cloud computing.”
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