Objectway had the pleasure to host Davide Balladori, FSI Lead Italy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), who delivered a keynote at our flagship conference OWIN23, as a leading voice in Financial Services on Sustainable Innovation at Scale. The presentation highlighted the key aspects of modernization, innovation, and transformation in our industry. AWS’s prowess lies in leveraging a savvy mix of people, organization, and technology to empower individuals, reshape organizations, and harness the potential of the cloud.

As an AWS Partner, we have proudly offered our customers a unique opportunity to take full advantage of listening to all that AWS has to offer to accelerate their journey to the cloud. We joined competences to provide innovative solutions and deliver value to our mutual customers.

Discover more below, from Davide Balladori himself!

Accelerating Cloud adoption & facing challenges

The pandemic has unequivocally settled the debate on whether financial institutions should move to the cloud. Instead, customers now ask, “how fast?” financial services organizations are modernizing legacy systems to meet their evolving expectations, respond to market volatility, and reduce time-to-market. The adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning is also on the rise, enabling companies to innovate, create new products, and gain a competitive edge. Also, customers increasingly expect on-demand customer service, targeted products, and consistent omni-channel experiences. To remain competitive and achieve optimal customer engagement, financial institutions must therefore deliver relevant and responsible personalization.

Still, as the financial services industry shifts to the cloud, it faces a multitude of challenges, including constantly evolving regulatory requirements, dynamic security threats, stringent reporting and documentation demands, and a scarcity of cloud security and compliance specialists. AWS addresses these challenges by collaborating directly with technology partners, financial institutions and regulators to enable secure and compliant adoption of its services.

AWS’ approach to Sustainability & Innovation

AWS not only excels in technology but also demonstrates a strong commitment to sustainability, to have something lasting strategically and build for decades from now. Amazon has undertaken numerous renewable energy projects worldwide, making it the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy globally. By integrating power optimization, leveraging efficient servers, and employing innovative cooling systems, AWS achieves higher energy efficiency and reduced environmental impact.

This aligns with AWS’ customer-centric approach to innovation; our unique approach to innovation begins with the customer. By identifying unexpressed needs or well-defined requirements, AWS works backwards to develop solutions.

Scaling Innovation: The elements of success in Amazon and AWS

The 4 key elements of Mechanism, Culture, Architecture, and Organization drive innovation in Amazon and AWS. Mechanism replaces rigid processes, enabling change and continuous improvement. The customer-obsessed culture fosters entrepreneurship and diversity. Agile architecture, through microservices and self-service artifacts, facilitates prototyping and scalability. The unique organizational structure ensures customer-centricity and flexibility.

AWS drives innovation by prioritizing customer success. Through digital innovation, AWS inspires and guides customers to focus on their objectives, leveraging the cloud as an enabler. However, cloud adoption goes beyond technology; it involves cloud-powered organizational change.

Each organization’s cloud journey is unique. To succeed in the transformation, you’ll need to envision your desired target state, understand your cloud readiness, and adopt an agile approach to closing the gaps, which 99% of times are not related to technology but are driven by people and organization and their associated attitude and capability to innovate.

The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) outlines a value chain where technological, process, organizational, and product transformations are interconnected. The six perspectives of such framework – Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations – encompass capabilities crucial for a successful cloud transformation journey.