Accelerate your hybrid cloud transformation with the IBM Cloud for Financial Service Validation program

The cloud is a strategic tool that supports the digital transformation of financial institutions.

As banking and other regulated industries continue to shift to a digital-first approach, financial institutions are working to leverage the benefits of digital transformation. There is a lot of innovation happening as new technologies emerge in areas such as data, AI, payments, cybersecurity, and risk management. Many of these new technologies were born in the cloud. Banks want to take advantage of these new innovations. This is a significant shift in the business model, moving from a capital expenditures approach to an operating expenditures approach, allowing financial organizations to focus on their core business. However, moving from a traditional on-premises environment to a public cloud PaaS or SaaS model raises significant cybersecurity, risk, and regulatory issues that continue to impede progress.

The challenge is balancing innovation, compliance, risk and market dynamics.

While many organizations recognize the broad pool of innovation that public cloud platforms provide, financially regulated customers are still accustomed to the level of control and visibility provided by on-premises environments. Despite the potential benefits, cybersecurity remains a major concern in public cloud adoption. The average cost of a large-scale breach is as much as $400 million, with misconfigured clouds becoming a primary attack vector. This has made many organizations hesitant to make the switch for fear of losing control and security of their on-premises environment. It is encouraging to see that the banking industry continues to transition to a digital-first approach. However, financial organizations should carefully consider the risks associated with public cloud adoption and ensure they have appropriate security measures in place before making the switch.

The traditional approach to banking and ISV application onboarding involves a review process consisting of several key items:

• Third-party architecture review, which requires an architecture document that describes how the ISV will deploy in the cloud and how it will be secured.
• A third-party risk management review that must explain how the ISV complies with required controls.
• A third-party investment review that provides a bill of materials (BOM) that shows the services and methods used by the ISV to meet compliance requirements, along with pricing.

ISVs are expected to be prepared for all of these reviews, and the entire onboarding life cycle through this process currently takes over 24 months.

Why do you need FS Cloud and FS Verifier?

IBM has created a solution to this problem through its Financial Services Cloud offering and the ISV Financial Services Verification Program, designed to de-risk the partner ecosystem for customers. This helps accelerate continuous integration and continuous delivery in the cloud. This program ensures that new innovations coming from these ISVs are verified, tested, and ready to be deployed in a safe and compliant manner. IBM’s ISV Validation program enables banks to confidently adopt new innovative products in the cloud and stay ahead of the innovation race.

Ensuring the success of your cloud transformation journey requires a combination of modern governance, standard control frameworks, and automation. There are a variety of industry frameworks that can be used to secure and deliver a compliance posture. Ongoing compliance with industry frameworks, informed by an industry coalition of representatives from leading banks and other compliance organizations around the world, is essential. IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services is uniquely positioned to meet all of these requirements.

IBM Cloud for Financial Services® is a secure cloud platform designed to reduce risk for customers by providing high levels of visibility, control, compliance and best-in-class security. This allows financial institutions to accelerate innovation, create new revenue opportunities, and reduce compliance costs by providing access to pre-vetted partners and solutions that comply with financial services security and governance. The platform also provides risk management and compliance automation, continuous monitoring, and audit reporting capabilities, as well as on-demand visibility for customers, auditors, and regulators.

Our mission is to prepare ISVs to adapt to cloud and SaaS models and meet the security standards and compliance requirements required for ISVs to do business with financial institutions in the cloud. Our process has resulted in significant improvements in compliance and onboarding cycle times, reducing them to less than six months. Through this process, we are building an ISV ecosystem validated by IBM Cloud for Financial Services, providing customers with a network of trusted providers.

Streamlined processes and tools

IBM® has created well-defined processes and a variety of tools, technologies and automation to support ISVs as part of their validation program. We offer an integrated onboarding platform that ensures a smooth and uninterrupted experience. The platform serves as a centralized hub to guide ISVs throughout the entire program, from initial engagement to final control validation. The onboarding platform explores ISVs through the following steps:

Orientation and training

The platform offers a catalog of self-paced courses to help you become familiar with the processes and tools used during IBM Cloud for Financial Services onboarding and qualification. The self-paced format allows you to learn at your own pace and schedule.

ISV Control Analysis

ISV Controls Analysis serves as an initial assessment of your organization’s security and risk posture and lays the foundation for IBM to plan necessary onboarding activities.

Architecture Evaluation

The architecture assessment evaluates the architecture of the ISV’s cloud environment. The assessment is designed to help ISVs identify gaps in their cloud architecture and recommend best practices to strengthen compliance and governance of their cloud environments.

Deployment Plan

Deploy ISV applications in a secure environment and manage their workloads on IBM Cloud®. These steps are designed to meet your organization’s security and compliance requirements. We provide a comprehensive set of security controls and services to help protect customer data and applications and meet appropriate security architecture requirements.

security assessment

A security assessment is the process of evaluating the security controls of a proposed business process against the enhanced set of industry-specific control requirements in the IBM Cloud for Financial Services Framework. This process helps identify vulnerabilities, threats, and risks that could compromise system security and allows you to implement appropriate security measures to address these issues.

Professional guidance from IBM and KPMG teams

The IBM team provides guidance and assets to help accelerate your onboarding process in a trusted, shared model. We also help ISVs deploy and test their applications on IBM Cloud for Financial Services approved architecture. We work with ISVs throughout the controls evaluation process to help their applications achieve IBM Cloud for Financial Services validation status. Our goal is to ensure ISVs meet our rigorous standards and remain compliant with industry regulations. We’re also partnering with KPMG, an industry leader in security and compliance, to add value to ISVs and customers.

Reduce time to revenue and costs

This process allows ISVs to be ready and go to market in less than eight weeks, reducing overall time to market and overall onboarding costs for end customers. Additional resources are available here.

What are the benefits of partnering with IBM?

As an ISV, you have access to a wide range of financial institutional customers. Our cloud is trusted by 92 of the top 100 banks, giving us a significant advantage in the industry.

Take your solutions to the next level with cutting-edge capabilities by co-developing with an IBM team of expert designers and developers.

Partnering with us can enhance your go-to-market strategy through co-selling. We can help you leverage our extensive sales channels, incentive programs, customer relationships and industry expertise.

You get access to our technology services and cloud credits as you invest in innovation.

Our marketplaces, like the IBM Cloud® Catalog and Red Hat Marketplace, provide great opportunities to sell your products and services to a wider audience.

Finally, our marketing and direct investments in marketing can help us generate demand and effectively reach our target customers.

See IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services.