The financial services industry is changing—an estimated $68 trillion in wealth transferring from baby boomers to millennials.¹ This means financial service providers will have to deliver the speed, ease-of-use, technological sophistication, and tailored services that millennials have come to expect. In fact, half of all millennials are willing to switch to a competing institution if it offers a better digital experience.² This and many other trends are driving unprecedented growth for mobile Fintech experiences in banking, digital payments, financial management and insurance.³

Google Maps Platform financial services solutions

To help you respond to customer’s changing demands, we’re launching financial services solutions that can help you improve your customer experience, security and operations. We’ve outlined the technical guidance and APIs you need to build out three financial services solutions: Enriched Transactions, Quick and Verified Sign-up, and Branch and ATM Locator Plus. We’ve also highlighted two use cases that customers are using our APIs to solve: Contextual Experiences and Fraud Detection. 

Clarify financial statements with Enriched Transactions solution

Transaction statements are often hard for customers to understand, using abbreviations like “ACMEHCORP” instead of customer-facing names like “Acme Houseware”. Our Enriched Transactions solution clarifies these transactions and makes them instantly recognizable by adding the merchant name and business category, a photo of the storefront, its location on a map, and full contact info. Making transactions easier to recognize not only boosts consumer confidence, with reported increases in NPS of 15% or higher, but decreases costly support calls by approximately 67%.⁴

In addition, you can help customers easily visualize a series of transactions by adding the merchant name to the transaction amount and date, and displaying their transactions on a Google map. This enables you to give customers insights about where and how they spend money. See the guide to implement Enriched Transactions today.

Enable faster sign-up with Quick and Verified Sign-up solution

Manually entered addresses can lead to lowered conversions, erroneous customer data, and costly delivery mistakes. Our Quick and Verified Sign-up solution makes sign-up faster, suggesting nearby addresses with just a few thumb taps—cutting sign-up time by up to 64% and increasing conversion rates by up to 15%.⁵  

The solution also provides one additional level of address verification that helps reduce the risk of fraudulent account sign-ups—and companies have decreased fraudulent account setups by approximately 30% through using geospatial data to verify customer identities.⁴  See the Quick and Verified Sign-up solution guide to get started today.

• Faster sign-ups 1An application form requires an address
• Faster sign-ups 2Autocomplete quickly suggests addresses
• Faster sign-ups 3Select the address with visual confirmation
• Faster sign-ups 4Address verification options are presented
• Faster sign-ups 5Location permission is granted by the user
• Faster sign-ups 6The address is verified

Help customers visit you with Branch and ATM Locator Plus solution

74% of customers now search for specific details prior to their visit, which makes detailed, accurate profiles for each location a must.⁵ Our Branch and ATM Locator Plus solution enhances your own websites and apps with the same information shown about your branches and ATMs on Google Maps. Include hours of operation, available services, user reviews, photos of the location, driving directions and more.

Financial services companies using geospatial data to provide additional information (e.g. opening hours, available services, etc.) on branch and ATM services have seen a 14% increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS), and a 7% decrease in customer support calls.⁴  Implement Branch and ATM Locator Plus today using the guide or build it in minutes with Quick Builder.

• ATM locator 1Customers can enable location permissions, or enter their address
• ATM locator 2Quickly enter the address with Autocomplete
• ATM locator 3Nearby location listings, ranked by distance and ETA
• ATM locator 4Map view and directions

Enable offers and rewards with Contextual Experiences                    

Real-time, geo-targeted offers can power deals, rewards, and cash-back programs—all visualized with rich Google Maps. By combining the insights of purchase histories with customer opt-in to location-based features, companies can implement the Contextual Experiences use case to enable personalized offers and rewards programs that drive engagement with brands while putting money in customers’ pockets at the same time.This is a win for banks and their customers, validated by encouraging metrics like NPS rating boosts of 8% or higher, and an increase of 8% or more time spent in-app.⁴  Learn how Current uses Google Maps Platform to create innovative customer rewards programs with location intelligence.

Detect suspicious transactions with Fraud Detection

With the Fraud Detection use case, companies can use customer opted-in mobile device location to flag suspicious activity based on geographic distance, such as an ATM withdrawal that is far from the customer’s phone. Our APIs can also help companies recognize suspicious transaction patterns such as a purchase made at a location that is physically distant from a recent transaction. 

Financial services companies that use geospatial data to verify customers’ identities have reduced fraudulent transactions by approximately 70%, and false positives in fraud detection by 45%, on average.⁴  Learn how Starling Bank uses Google Maps Platform to enable real-time notification of transactions and their locations, and enhance data-driven decision-making.

Start elevating customer experiences, reducing risk and increasing efficiency today with our financial services offerings. Visit our financial services solutions page to learn more about how to start implementing these solutions.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

Most enterprises have applications in disparate locations—in their own data centers, in multiple public clouds, and at the edge. These apps run on different proprietary technology stacks, which reduces developer velocity, wastes computing resources, and hinders scalability. How can you consistently secure and operate existing apps, while developing and deploying new apps across hybrid and multicloud environments? How can you get centralized visibility and management of the resources? Well, that is why Anthos exists!

This post explores why traditional hybrid and multicloud deployments are difficult, and then shows how Anthos makes it easy to manage applications across multiple environments. 

Why is traditional hybrid and multicloud difficult?

In hybrid and multicloud environments, you need to manage infrastructure. Let’s say you use containers on the clouds, and you develop apps using services on Google Cloud and AWS. Regardless of environment, you will need policy enforcement across your IT footprint. To manage your apps across the environment, you need monitoring and logging systems. You need to integrate that data into meaningful categories, like business data, operational data, and alerts.

Digging further, you might use operational data and alerts to inform optimizations, implement automations, and set policies or SLOs. You might use business data to do all those things, and to deploy third-party apps. Then, to actually enact the changes you decide to implement, you need to act on different parts of the system. That means digging into each tool for policy enforcement, securing services, orchestrating containers, and managing infrastructure. Don’t forget, all of this work is in addition to what it takes to develop and deploy your own apps.

Now, consider repeating this set of tasks across a hybrid and multicloud landscape. It becomes very complex, very quickly. Your platform admins, SREs,  and DevOps teams who are responsible for security and efficiency have to do manual, cluster-by-cluster management, data collection, and information synthesis. With this complexity, it’s hard to stay current, to understand business implications, and to ensure compliance (not to mention the difficulty of onboarding a new hire). Anthos helps solve these challenges!

How does Anthos make hybrid and multicloud easy?

With Anthos, you get a consistent way to manage your infrastructure, with similar infrastructure management, container management, service management, and policy enforcement across your landscape.

As a result, you have observability across all your platforms in one place, including access to business information, alerts, and operations information. With this information you might decide to optimize, automate, and set policies or SLOs. 

Digging deeper into Anthos 

Environs

You may have different regions that need different policies, and also have different development, staging, or production environments that need different permissions. Some parts of your work may need more security. That’s where environs come in! Environs are a way to create logical sets of underlying Kubernetes clusters, regardless of which platform those clusters live on. 

By considering, grouping, and managing sets of clusters as logical environs, you can think about and work with your applications at the right level of detail for what you need to do, be it acquiring business insights over the entire system, updating settings for a dev environment, or troubleshooting data for a specific cluster. Using environs, each part of the functional stack can take declarative direction about configuration, compliance, and more.

Modernize application development

Anthos also helps modernize application development because it uses environs to enforce policies and processes, and abstracts away the cluster and container management from application teams. Anthos enables you to easily abstract away infrastructure from application teams, making it easy for them to incorporate a wide variety of CI/CD solutions on top of environs.  It lets you view and manage your applications at the right level of detail, be it business insights for services across the entire system, or troubleshooting data for a specific cluster. Anthos also works with container-based tools like buildpacks to simplify the packaging process. It offers Migrate for Anthos to take those applications out of the VMs and move them to a more modern hosting environment. 

What’s in it for platform administrators? 

Anthos provides platform administrators a single place to monitor and manage their landscape, with policy control and marketplace access. This reduces person-hours needed for management, enforcement, discovery, and communication. Anthos also provides administrators an out-of-the-box structured view of their entire system, including services, clusters, and more, so they can improve security, use resources more efficiently, and demonstrate measurable success. Administrators also save time and effort by managing declaratively, and they can communicate the success, cost savings, and efficiency of the platforms without needing to manually combine data. 

Interested in getting started with Anthos? Check out the free on-demand training here and my YouTube series. 

For more resources, you can also read the Anthos ebook at no cost. For more #GCPSketchnote and similar cloud content, follow me on twitter @pvergadia and keep an eye out on thecloudgirl.dev

Whether they’re reading the newspaper on the way to work, or catching up on the latest headlines on their smartphones, readers expect up-to-the-minute news wherever and whenever makes the most sense for them. As a result, media companies are increasingly looking for ways to improve, expand, and simplify their offerings, and they’re increasingly looking to the cloud to do it.

For more than 160 years The Telegraph has been counted on by readers across the United Kingdom and globally for award-winning news and journalism. An early adopter of cloud technology, it’s been a G Suite customer since 2008 and has already been using Google Cloud Platform to analyze digital behaviors to improve engagement and advertising performance since 2016.

Recently, The Telegraph announced it’s migrating fully to Google Cloud. By migrating all their production and pre-production services, they aim to deliver content faster, provide compelling experiences to readers, and reduce environmental impact.

“We are delighted to announce our newest collaboration with Google Cloud,” said Chris Taylor, Chief Information Officer, The Telegraph. “We have always worked closely with Google as they help us to provide our readers with great experiences on our digital products, collaboration software and internet scale through search. Their continued leadership in projects such as Kubernetes are enabling us to build flexible development environments that truly support DevOps.”

Powering the Digital Publishing Ecosystem

The Telegraph produces large volumes of digital content every day. It was imperative for them to find a cloud provider they could trust to support this ecosystem. By working with Google Cloud they have changed the way they see and engage with data: they can collect new information about their products every second and use that to continually hone their strategy. The Telegraph are placing more confidence and trust in the data captured about their content and now have one of the best available pieces of technology for capturing and analyzing the stories they publish in real-time.

Leveraging AI to support journalists

Time is critical when journalists are on a story, and The Telegraph wants to put important data in the hands of its journalists right when they need it. To do this, it will be using AutoML to classify content for journalists and make it more discoverable. For example, a reporter will be able to bring up relevant assets that link to their stories. It will also apply AutoML to classify Telegraph stock photos to help journalists attach compelling visual content to their stories faster.

Building compelling reader experiences with the help of APIs

Readers have an ever-increasing expectation of personalization. To meet this need, The Telegraph launched My Telegraph, currently live in beta, to offer registered readers personalized news experiences based on their interests or the particular journalists they want to follow. My Telegraph was developed on an API management platform provided by Google Cloud’s Apigee. You can learn more about how it’s applying API management to My Telegraph, in this blog post.

Working for environmental good

The Telegraph is the biggest selling quality newspaper in the UK, an accolade which requires it to print and distribute hundreds of thousands of copies each day. Optimal management of print production is important, and by using a combination of the cloud and machine learning, The Telegraph is better able to predict demand for physical newspapers, maximizing sales and minimizing waste. This makes great business sense for The Telegraph but also has great environmental benefit.