When I reflect back on the past year and the pandemic, I’m struck by how the reliance on remote work and operations has changed the fundamentals of business forever. For the financial services industry, this rings particularly true. Many conversations I’m having right now with organizations revolve around embracing a transformation cloud, and thinking of cloud computing not just as an infrastructure decision, but also as the locus for transformation throughout the company. 

Today, as we welcome the industry to our Financial Services Summit, we’ll demonstrate just how Google Cloud accelerates a financial organization’s digital transformation through app and infrastructure modernization, data democratization, people connections, and trusted transactions. We hope you’ll join us.

How we’re helping financial services firms build their transformation clouds

At Google Cloud, we continue to focus on areas where we can bring the best of our capabilities to banking, capital markets, insurance, and payments customers around the world. Our work with financial services industry customers has given us a deep understanding of the real-world, specific use cases that matter most to them. This groundwork led us to engineer products and solutions that are open and flexible, not ones that force them to rip out existing investments in ERP or other early IaaS cloud implementations. 

It’s why we’ve engineered solutions such as Lending DocAI, Open Banking with Apigee, and Datashare for financial services to help transform the industry. These solutions were created with our customers’ security and compliance top-of-mind and are built at the intersection of user-optimized experience, technology, and sovereignty.

At their core, financial institutions want to drive growth, reduce costs, mitigate risk, stay compliant, and increase efficiency. As a result, when we partner with them on their transformation journeys, we consider three essential focus areas: 

• Enabling the human experience and connected interactions
• Building an open and intelligent data foundation for better insights
• Providing the most trusted and secure cloud in the industry

Enabling humans and connected interactions

A company’s transformation is about more than technology; people and culture ultimately drive change. HSBC, for example, recognized its business users would benefit from guided answers to common questions around risk policy compliance, and turned to Google Cloud to leverage AI and machine learning bots to assist employees, ease the burden on policy experts, and improve the user experience. Using Dialogflow, a core component of Contact Center AI, HSBC was able to build a conversational platform that quickly and accurately addresses user needs at scale. 

Another example is Equifax, which used Google Workspace to support collaboration not only internally between employees, but also externally with customers. Customers can use Google Cloud solutions for financial services to build these sorts of technology-enabled human interactions quickly and easily—supporting organizational change at scale.

Building an open and intelligent data foundation for smarter, faster insights

The real impact of Google Cloud solutions for financial services comes when the whole company has access to the right information at the right time, and can act more intelligently on that data. Our solutions help businesses safely leverage their data and get a complete 360-degree view of their customers’ information, which can often be scattered across multiple systems (CRM, lending, credit, etc.). This helps financial institutions improve the overall customer experience—and sometimes even develop new products quickly. 

Indeed, all financial institutions are looking for ways to grow revenue and reduce expenses, and data can be a critical ingredient to doing both effectively. As daily transactions rise, so does the volume and complexity of data. But to implement new customer experience innovations (and new revenue streams), financial institutions must first capture data effectively. This is why AXA Switzerland, for example, uses real-time analytics on Google Cloud to gain cross-industry insights about future trends and customer preferences.

Financial services organizations also need the confidence of building on a platform that provides choice, flexibility, and agility to move fast. It’s why we have an open cloud approach that allows Google Cloud services to run in different physical locations such as on-premises, other public clouds, and the edge. Customers can also harness the power of data and AI through our open APIs, machine-learning services, and analytics engines on any major cloud platform. This is why companies like Macquarie Bank are taking advantage of Google Cloud’s open, hybrid architecture to modernize and empower its developers.

Compliant and secure to address risk and regulatory needs

As a highly regulated industry, financial services is focused on security and compliance, risk and regulations, and fraud detection and prevention. Google Cloud offers unique capabilities to earn customers’ trust as part of our continuing work to be the most trusted cloud in the industry. Google Cloud provides a secure foundation that you can verify and independently control. Our cloud technology reduces risk and data loss, because it is built on comprehensive zero-trust architecture. Finally, we offer a shared-fate model built on best practices in risk management via automation, guidance, and insurance. This is why customers like BBVA have confidence anywhere their systems may operate. 

On the regulatory front, global legislators and regulators continue to focus on the stability of the industry that only a decade ago went through one of the biggest liquidity crises in history. With this oversight comes strong expectations of risk mitigation. Google Cloud offers a single, global set of controls, reviewed by financial institutions and regulators around the world, and verified in collaborative audits—making compliance simpler and less costly for our customers.

Finally, Google Cloud allows financial services firms to operate confidently with advanced security tools that help protect data, applications, and infrastructure, as well as their customers from fraudulent activity, spam, and abuse. We help protect your data against threats, using the same infrastructure and security services we use for our own operations, ensuring you never have to trade-off between ease of use and security. Google Cloud encrypts data at-rest and in-transit. And we now also offer the ability to encrypt data-in use, while it’s being processed for customer VM and container workloads.

Let us help you with your transformation cloud journey

We’ve seen leading financial services companies embrace Google Cloud to help them move beyond infrastructure toward the next phase of their cloud evolution. This is an era where no company is better positioned to lead than Google Cloud, and we’re excited to help you with your journey.

Learn more about Google Cloud for financial services.

Google Cloud Functions provides a simple and intuitive developer experience to execute code from Google Cloud, Firebase, Google Assistant, or any web, mobile, or backend application. Oftentimes that code needs secrets—like API keys, passwords, or certificates—to authenticate to or invoke upstream APIs and services.

While Google Secret Manager is a fully-managed, secure, and convenient storage system for such secrets, developers have historically leveraged environment variables or the filesystem for managing secrets in Cloud Functions. This was largely because integrating with Secret Manager required developers to write custom code… until now. We listened to customer feedback and today we are announcing Cloud Functions has a native integration with Secret Manager!

This native integration has many key benefits including:

• Zero required code changes. Cloud functions that already consume secrets via environment variables or files bundled with the source upload simply require an additional flag during deployment. The Cloud Functions service resolves and injects the secrets at runtime and the plaintext values are only visible inside the process.
• Easy environment separation. It’s easy to use the same codebase across multiple environments, e.g., dev, staging, and prod, because the secrets are decoupled from the code and are resolved at runtime.
• Supports the 12-factor app pattern. Because secrets can be injected into environment variables at runtime, the native integration supports the 12-factor pattern while providing stronger security guarantees.
• Centralized secret storage, access, and auditing. Leveraging Secret Manager as the centralized secrets management solution enables easy management of access controls, auditing, and access logs.

Cloud Functions’ native integration with Secret Manager is available in preview to all Google Cloud customers today. Let’s take a deeper dive into this new integration.

Example

Suppose the following cloud function invoked via HTTP uses a secret token to invoke an upstream API:

  const https = require('https');
const token = process.env.TOKEN;

exports.secretDemo = (req, res) => {
  https.get(`https://upstream-api.example.com?token=${token}`, (innerRes) => {
    innerRes.on('end', () => { res.send('OK') });
  }).on('error', (err) => {
    res.send(`Error: ${err}`);
  });
}

Without Cloud Functions’ native integration with Secret Manager, this function is deployed via:

  $ gcloud functions deploy "secretDemo" \
    --runtime "nodejs14" \
    --trigger-http \
    --allow-unauthenticated \
    --set-env-vars "TOKEN=abcd1234"

This approach has a number of drawbacks, the biggest of which being that anyone with viewer permissions on the Google Cloud project can see the environment variables set on a cloud function.

To improve the security of this code, migrate the secret to Secret Manager in the same project:

  $ gcloud secrets create "token" \
    --replication-policy "automatic" \
    --data-file - <<< "abcd1234"

Finally, without changing any code in the function re-deploy with slightly different flags:

  $ gcloud beta functions deploy "secretDemo" \
    --runtime "nodejs14" \
    --trigger-http \
    --allow-unauthenticated \
    --set-secrets "TOKEN=my_token:latest"

It’s truly that easy to migrate from hard-coded secrets to using secure secret storage with Secret Manager! To add even more layers of security, consider running each cloud function with a dedicated service account and practice the principle of least privilege. Learn more in the Secret Manager Best Practices guide.

Making security easy

Security and proper secrets management are core pillars of modern software development, and we’re excited to provide customers a way to improve the security of their cloud functions. To learn more about the new native integration, check out the Cloud Functions documentation. You can also learn more about Cloud Functions or learn more about Secret Manager.

We’re excited to announce that Google Cloud Next returns on October 11–13, 2022. 

Join us for keynotes from industry luminaries and engage live with Google developers. Explore dynamic content across various learning levels, and dive deep into technologies and solutions spanning the Google Cloud and Google Workspace portfolios. Participate in breakout sessions, demos, and hands-on training. Hear from the world’s leading companies about their digital transformation journeys. You’ll have opportunities to connect with experts, get inspired, and boost your skills. We can’t wait to see you at Next ’22!

It’s too early to determine how the event experience will span the digital and physical worlds, so please stay tuned for updates as we plan with the health and safety of the attendees in mind. In the meantime, mark October 11–13 in your calendar, and visit our event site for updates. For more inspiration, rediscover Next ’21, now available on demand.