Our fourth episode is with John Painter (or JP, as he’s more commonly known), Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Cloud and Financial Services at Amdocs.  

Amdocs is a dominant player in the telecommunications space but is now making a big push into financial services. Some early client wins include ABN Amro, Bank Hapoalim and Union Digital bank in the Philippines.

This discussion runs to approx. 45 minutes and is intended for a non-technical audience. We start with some basic definitions and survey data on bank spend on cloud, then get into migration issues, "lift and shift" versus re-factoring, with some war stories of big migrations gone wrong, but also JP’s personal experience at the centre of DBS’ extraordinary cloud transformation program. We finish with insights on how cloud can enable new business models, such as embedded finance.  

Time stamps as follows:

01:20 - JP introduces himself, his background, and the acquisition bringing him into Amdocs

03:30 - JP provides a working definition of “cloud” and “cloud transformation in banking”

05:36 - JP responds to GD exec survey data showing that “cost reduction” is less of a spend driver in cloud now (2023) than before (2021-2022)

11:03 - JP responds to CTOs at new digital banks claiming cloud is “the best and worst of technologies”, as benefits can be great but take time to realise

15:43 - JP comments on examples of banks going all in on cloud but then stepping back from that, as Dropbox has done

19:02 - JP comments on considerations between “lift and shift”, infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service in the context of legacy modernization

22:30 - JP provides examples of benefits banks can get from “life and shift” versus refactoring

26:40 - JP talks us through the top three ways big bank migrations typically go wrong

31:20 - JP talks us through prospects of big bank migrations going wrong again, as per the TSB Bank scare story

34:57 - JP talks through how cloud migrations can make it easier to pursue new business models

38:15 - JP talks through DBS’ cloud program, and what they achieved and how

41:22 - JP comments on concentration risks of working with only a handful of cloud providers

44:30 - We thank JP for his insight and guide listeners toward relevant GD research