Snap and Google Cloud Team Up to Upskill Teams Worldwide

1658
Of your peers have already read this article.
2:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Snap inc., the developer of the Snapchat platform, has become a global leader in the social media industry. Snap runs its business on Google Cloud, and relies on Premium Support to optimize its cloud business imperatives. Snap sought new ways to extract business value from their cloud data, so turned to their assigned Google Technical Account Management team to develop a means to strengthen and expand cloud skills to meet their goal. The Technical Account Managers (TAMs) serve as an extension of the Snap Engineering Program Management team to deliver deep expertise of Google Cloud and guide Snap in their cloud journey including mapping the essential cloud skills for Snap to achieve broader business strategy. Since Snap employees had varying levels of cloud expertise, it meant that their TAM team needed to design a tailored learning program to optimally meet Snap’s needs.
The TAM team engaged with Google Cloud Customer Experience (CCE) team which included cloud support, learning, consulting, customer success and customer insight and advocacy services. The Google team leveraged a Skill Training Survey for the Snap team to identify, extract and map existing skills to the level of targeted cloud skills that would enable them to design a learning curriculum to boost employee productivity, enable efficient scaling and strengthen the mitigation of technical issues while optimizing their environment for issue prevention. In addition, Google Cloud offered instructor-led virtual training focused on Looker, Kubernetes and others topics of interest and a tailored Snap Global Training Program was launched in the last quarter of 2022.
By including training for Looker, it expanded Snap employees’ ability to reach data-driven decisions. Snap also took advantage of the Google Cloud Skills Boost licenses delivering access to a learning platform with over 700 courses and learning labs, included with Premium Support.
Next, the TAMs and CCE teams were tasked to raise internal awareness of the global Snap training program, so they developed a comprehensive marketing and communications plan to drive promotion over a twelve week period to prospective trainees through newsletters, email groups, Slack channels, Engineering meetings, and an internal site dedicated to Snap training resources.
“Partnering with Google to provide Snap engineers with learning opportunities aligns with Snap’s values of Kind, Smart and Creative. Investing in growing our team member’s skills helps them personally advance and helps our business achieve our goals.”—Michele Vaughan, Snap Engineering Program Manager
The Google-led Snap Global Training Program includes hands-on, instructor-led training, in-person gamified Cloud Hero Learning Events, and access to on-demand Google Cloud Skills Boost labs. Over 100 trainees at Snap initially participated in the instructor-led training, and more than 500 employees completed the on-demand labs. This training program has enabled Snap employees to develop and strengthen skills in the targeted cloud areas including data visualization, AI and ML, and Kubernetes. In addition, the program ignited a Looker Advisory Professional Services initiative to advise Snap with best practices and improvements for the usage of Looker. These skills enable Snap to extract increased value for their cloud data and guide the future of their business for sustaining a competitive advantage in a dynamic marketplace.
To learn more about how Google Cloud Customer Experience can support your organization’s business transformation journey with cloud support, learning, consulting, customer success, and customer insight and advocacy services, visit:
- Premium Support to empower business innovation with expert-led technical guidance and cloud support
- Google Cloud Training & Certification to expand and diversify your team’s cloud education
A Year of Connecting Brand and Consumers with Google’s Business Messages

6180
Of your peers have already read this article.
3:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Last June, in the early months of the pandemic, we expanded Business Messages to support all kinds of businesses, from pharmacies and grocery stores to airlines and luxury brands. Then, in December, we announced the ability for small businesses to use the Google Maps app to message with their customers. We knew people would find messaging directly with businesses from Google Search and Maps helpful, but we didn’t know just how valuable it would turn out to be.
Consumers are increasingly eager to use messaging to connect with brands, and businesses across all industries are now building innovative messaging experiences to address that growing need. The demand from consumers is reflected in recent data:
- 45% of users have spent more time on messaging services because of the pandemic
- 85% of consumers would like to message brands directly, up from 65% in 2019
Being able to message a business directly has never been more important. For me personally, there’s nothing more fulfilling than using technology to help people in the moments that matter. After the release of initial COVID-19 vaccines in late 2020, online searches for vaccines reached an all-time high. To help people searching for vaccine eligibility, availability, and appointment booking, Albertsons Companies’ banner pharmacies—like Albertsons, Safeway, and Vons—made this information easily accessible through Google Search and Maps via the “chat” button. This gave people the information they needed, when they needed it.

To be more helpful in moments like these, over the last year, we’ve made Business Messages available globally, in more than 70 languages, and we’ve seen more than 30,000 brands and 200 partners come on board. Major brands like Carrefour, Walmart, and Woolworths have invested in Business Messages to help serve their consumers in new and meaningful ways.
Expanding the conversation between consumers and brands
The retail sector has undergone a transformation since the start of the pandemic. As a result, we know it is critical for digital services to integrate with physical stores. We were able to do just that with Google’s Business Messages, which has been instrumental in helping better serve our customers across 1200+ stores in Europe.
Thomas Rudelle
Global Digital Marketing Director, Carrefour
There were major shifts in consumer behavior during the pandemic, from the way people found and purchased products to the ways they interacted with businesses. Not only did we see higher demand for direct contact with brands, but retail searches also surged. At the end of 2020, retail searches grew at a rate that was more than three times higher than the same period in 2019 (based on Google internal data).
As Business Messages has become more widespread, brands are able to boost both responsiveness and customer satisfaction using the service. Levi’s, for example, surpassed 85% customer satisfaction scores using Business Messages and they discovered that the service drove 30x more store-related questions than web chat.

Many brands have also digitized what were traditionally in-store experiences, especially in high-consideration categories like jewelry. For example, Signet brought its virtual jewelry consultant to Business Messages, offering customers advice and answering queries in a way that’s convenient but still feels personal.We started using Google’s Business Messages pretty early on, and continue to transform and improve our experience. The ability to let customers know whether a product is in stock, and its precise location, is critical to offering a connected and frictionless shopper experience. Of course it also helps reduce the workload on our store and customer hub teams.
Nick Eshkenazi
Chief Digital Technology Officer, Woolworths

As a working mother, these sorts of innovations have made a direct impact in my own life. I find it very helpful to be able to ask—and get real-time answers to—everyday questions using Business Messages, ranging from store hours and product availability to order status and how to make returns. One of my favorite features is the ability to know, in real time, what store wait times are like, and the exact location of the product I’m looking for, saving me precious time when I visit the store.
Business Messages helps people do more with their time in other ways as well. Earlier this year I’d been meaning to change my insurance plan, but kept pushing it off because I didn’t want to get on a phone call. I can now message Geico to update my policy through the agent pretty effortlessly. Similarly, in India, Vi customers can use 24×7 real-time customer service to chat with their AI powered virtual assistant VIC, integrated with Google’s Business Messages, to check billing information, activate packs, add recharges and payments, check balances, and much more—and it all happens seamlessly.

Building a full suite of messaging products
We’re investing in building a full suite of messaging products that enable seamless conversational commerce to drive business results. As Business Messages continues to support brands in establishing their messaging presence on Google, we’re also experimenting with other ways to help them increase their reach and engagement on Search and Display. To accelerate on the digital front, we recently integrated AdLingo, a project built within Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator. This will enable brands to easily transform ads into AI powered, personalized conversations at scale.
For more information on how you can activate Business Messages, please reach us via the contact form on the Business Messages website. Merchants can also read and respond to messages via Google My Business or on the Google Maps app.
How Did DTDC Express Speed Up Decision-making and Collaboration by 10x—While Cutting Costs?

7300
Of your peers have already read this article.
6:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Among Indian courier and logistics businesses, DTDC has expanded rapidly since its foundation in 1990. Starting with seed capital of less than US$2,000, DTDC has grown to a US$175 million business with operations across the country and internationally.
The business is second only to the government-owned India Post in the courier and logistics sector with 522 offices, more than 10,700 franchisees, and a 5,000 employee-strong workforce.
It handles 450,000 shipments—primarily small to medium parcels—per day, has a direct presence in 12 countries, a presence through associates in 22 countries, and operates 16 gateway hubs.
DTDC’s mission is to become India’s preferred express parcel provider with a focus on the consumer and the company aims to be valued at INR 5,000 crore (about US$778 million) by 2020.
However, like all businesses in the courier and logistics sector, DTDC is facing greater competition. Most of the large ecommerce businesses in the country have created their own express delivery arms and these are contributing to heightened customer expectations.
“Businesses and consumers want information and answers now rather than later today or tomorrow,” Mrinal Chakraborty, Executive Vice President, Technology and Innovation, DTDC, says.
“For example, customers are looking for direct API integration between their systems and our tracking tools, rather than a mundane, old-style MIS-driven approach.
“The express delivery businesses themselves are eager to embrace trends such as increased predictability of delivery, greater capacity utilization, and how vehicles can be run in the most efficient way possible.”
External-facing Technology Policies
DTDC had operated a traditional technology operation including in-house infrastructure located in a mid-sized data centre at its Bangalore headquarters. This in-house data centre housed a completely virtualised server-storage environment and connected to all 522 offices by MPLS link or internet-based VPN services. The business also operated a small disaster recovery facility in another city in India.
However, DTDC realised its technology operation could not deliver the agility, flexibility, and performance needed for the business to thrive in a highly disrupted industry.
Its technology leaders started reviewing their options and in early 2017 adopted a policy that embraced external models such as public cloud services. The business moved its SAP HANA relational database management into the cloud and now is considering using Google Cloud Platform to host its core enterprise resource planning system.
Google Cloud Platform also gives DTDC the ability to analyse data in order to improve the efficiency and predictability of its services.
An Opportunity for Change
While the business had implemented cloud-based office productivity applications in 2016, these applications were not meeting its needs, Chakraborty says.
“What we observed after three years, despite a considerable cost, these applications were only being used for email rather than as a full suite of collaboration tools,” he says.
“For example, if a simple presentation file needed to be delivered for decision-making, it had to be sent to about 20 stakeholders,” he adds. “We would then have to collect feedback from each and aggregate it into a final draft. This approach compromised productivity and decision-making, and meant multiple versions of data were circulating within the organisation.”
DTDC also wanted to extend mobility from a small group within the business to the wider organisation as part of a broader project to improve collaboration, productivity, and decision-making. In addition, the business intended to improve the usability and relevance of its intranets to its employees.
Furthermore, Chakraborty and his team planned to help improve collaboration within and the performance of DTDC’s more than 10,700 franchisees in responding to customer needs.
G Suite Targeted to Increase Collaboration
Based on his previous experience with G Suite, Chakraborty recommended the cloud-based suite of intelligent applications to DTDC’s senior management team. He also provided a comprehensive cost-effort-benefit analysis to back up his recommendation.
DTDC had started with a three-week proof of concept exercise spanning 20 users across the business. Having determined that G Suite met its business requirements, the courier and logistics provider had chosen a ‘big bang’ implementation across about 5,000 users.
DTDC switched over to G Suite on 23 June 2017 and undertook an extensive user acceptance and training program—called Project Liberty—over the following two weeks with the assistance of a 24-hours-per-day, seven-days-per-week helpdesk.
“We made hundreds of calls to our employees to explain the move, created and distributed an FAQ, and provided extensive training at regional office and branch office levels,” Chakraborty says. The business also displayed posters and banners at all DTDC offices, sent teaser messages to users, and provided daily G Suite usage tips over a three-week period.
“We completed that part of the move in about six days and by 1 July 2017 we had migrated all databases and all old emails to G Suite. Two weeks later, we had signed off the job,” Chakraborty says.
Considerable Cost Savings
DTDC has reaped several rewards from its move to G Suite. The amount the business spends on video conferencing has fallen from about US$5,000 per month to nearly zero as it takes advantage of the voice and video capabilities of Google Hangouts Meet.
“Largely because the volume of email attachments has fallen dramatically since we moved to Gmail—despite the fact our business has grown significantly—we have not had to upgrade any of our links over the last year or so,” Chakraborty says.
“Team members are increasingly sending links through Google Drive instead.” The ability to store files in the cloud through Google Drive has also enabled DTDC to eliminate the need to perform local backups of users’ files.
Meanwhile, team members are also increasingly using Google Calendar to make appointments and check the availability of colleagues and superiors for meetings.
Supporting Mobilisation with G Suite
Deploying G Suite has also enabled DTDC to increase the number of workers with access to email on their mobile devices from 150 users to more than 4,000 users.
“At our National Franchisee Meeting in Delhi in February 2018, our Chairman explicitly explained in an open forum how significantly his performance had improved since we deployed G Suite and implemented mobility,” Chakraborty says.
With sharing of spreadsheets and documents rising through the use of Google Sheets and Google Docs respectively, DTDC’s employees are collaborating more effectively and making decisions faster and more easily. Several departments within the business are using Google Sites to create intranets to host commonly-accessed documents and provide knowledge bases, including FAQ documents to help employees solve problems themselves.
“Thanks to G Suite, we have experienced a 10-fold increase in the speed of collaboration, decision-making, and supporting systems,” Chakraborty says. “The activities of our management team are more transparent and cohesive while as an organisation we are making decisions in hours and minutes rather than days.”
DTDC has also completed the migration of more than 10,700 franchisees across to G Suite. “Thus DTDC has become one of the few organisations where its Chairman and Managing Director and a small franchisee in a town in India would use the same intelligent applications,” Chakraborty says. “This makes the organisation much flatter, more collaborative operation in nature.
“Furthermore, franchisees who are using G Suite have started telling us that the ease of collaboration and access to information is enabling them to resolve customer queries faster and more effectively.”
Delivering a Bright Future with Google
DTDC plans to continue developing its intranets on Google Sites and encourage further use of Google Docs and Sheets.
“We are continuing to go back to our internal teams to highlight the benefits of these products and drive takeup to create more awareness and enthusiasm,” says Chakraborty.
DTDC has also started evaluating Google’s big data and analytics platform for its internal MIS and dashboard practices. “More broadly, we see Google as key to our ability to realise our business objectives and remain competitive in the dynamic, fast-changing courier and logistics industry,” Chakraborty concludes
AirAsia Flies High With Data Analytics and AI

6660
Of your peers have already read this article.
11:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
AirAsia’s vision is simple: allow everyone to fly. Founded in 2001, the airline and sister company AirAsia X have grown to service 150+ destinations in 25 markets, using 274 aircraft to operate 11,000+ weekly flights from 23 hubs across the region. While the airline is known as a provider of low-cost airfares to locations across Asia, this is only one part of its value proposition. AirAsia also aims to deliver innovative, personalized products and services that meet the needs of each of its passengers.
Technology is key to AirAsia’s success and, with strong support from Group Chief Executive Officer Tony Fernandes, in 2016 the airline began a five-year program to become a data-first business and a digital airline.
“We wanted to better ensure we were using data correctly to become more agile, efficient, and customer oriented,” says Lye Kong Wei, Chief of Data Science, Group Head at AirAsia.
AirAsia needed technologies and services that could capture, process, analyze, and report on data, while delivering value for money and meeting its speed and availability requirements. The airline also wanted to minimize infrastructure management and system administration demands on its technology team.
“We knew data was a big part of making decisions in the future. So we needed a platform that could scale to meet our growing appetite for it. Google Cloud—in particular BigQuery—was ideal for this task.”
—Lye Kong Wei, Chief of Data Science, Group Head, AirAsia
Google Cloud the best fit
AirAsia realized only a cloud service could meet its needs and began evaluating the market. The airline then conducted a proof of concept and found Google Cloud was the best fit for its business. It was already familiar with Google Cloud, having deployed G Suite collaboration and productivity applications to its workforce in all countries except China. According to Kong Wei, products such as Forms, Docs, Sheets, and Gmail delivered a considerable improvement in collaboration between various departments, as well as streamlining and automating a range of processes.
The business was particularly excited by the potential of the BigQuery analytics data warehouse to power its digital transformation. “We knew data was a big part of making decisions in the future,” says Kong Wei. “So we needed a platform that could scale to meet our growing appetite for it. Google Cloud—in particular BigQuery—was ideal for this task.”
“With BigQuery, we could process queries and requests much faster than previously and tackle more complex problems.”
—Lye Kong Wei, Chief of Data Science, Group Head, AirAsia
The AirAsia technology team was impressed by the ease and flexibility with which it could extract, transform, and load customer data from its systems, websites, and mobile applications into BigQuery for analysis. Data, reports, and dashboards were delivered and visualized through Google Data Studio.
BigQuery also scaled seamlessly to support data growth and, as a managed service, required minimal administration from the airline’s technology team. “In addition, with BigQuery, we could process queries and requests much faster than previously and tackle more complex problems,” says Kong Wei. “As a result, we could be more innovative about realizing opportunities,” he adds, citing the benefits of being able to view and understand historical measures of booking curves—a measure of how long it took customers to book before a flight. This improves the airline’s ability to manage revenues.
A broad ecosystem
BigQuery and Data Studio are just two components of a broad ecosystem—powered largely by Google Cloud services—deployed by AirAsia. Pub/Sub provides a scalable message queue that enables AirAsia developers to integrate systems hosted on Google Cloud or externally. Apache Airflow enables the business to create, schedule, and monitor workflows, while Cloud Composer manages the dependencies of PHP and related libraries. App Engine allows AirAsia personnel to develop and host web applications. “Thanks to App Engine, we’ve easily been able to create new applications, services, and APIs powered by the data we have been collecting,” says Kong Wei.
AirAsia is also running the middleware for its APIs in a managed Google Kubernetes Engine environment for increased scalability, resource optimization, and reliability, while Cloud Storage provides storage for data from a range of systems and sources. Dataflow enables the business to transform and process data in stream and batch modes from its website search page as customers look for flights.
“With a minimal number of people involved, we can very quickly transform an idea or thought process into a deliverable. Prior to Google Cloud, bringing those ideas to fruition would have been impossible.”
—Lye Kong Wei, Chief of Data Science, Group Head, AirAsia
Faster deployment and testing
The stability of Google Cloud service means AirAsia has a reliable base from which to launch new products and features. “If we have consistent reliability from our core systems—and Google Cloud incorporates monitoring tools such Cloud Monitoring that enable us to identify issues quickly—developers and product engineers can focus on turning ideas into reality,” says Kong Wei. “With a minimal number of people involved, we can very quickly transform an idea or thought process into a deliverable. Prior to Google Cloud, bringing those ideas to fruition would have been impossible.”
Robust security
AirAsia is also relying on Security Health Analytics, a product that integrates with Security Command Center, to identify misconfigurations and compliance violations in its Google Cloud resources and take action. Security Health Analytics ensures the airline’s budgets go to keeping customers’ travel costs low rather than recovering from security breaches.
The product enables AirAsia to check that resources are configured properly and are compliant with CIS benchmarks as its critical workloads run in Google Kubernetes Engine and App Engine.
“Being able to go to the new Security Health Analytics dashboard eliminates the guesswork of what we have running and if it is secure,” says Muhammad Faeez Bin Azmi, Information Security and Automation Solution Architect. “Now anyone on our team, even non-security professionals, can go to this dashboard and see a list of the misconfigured assets and compliance violations across all of our Google Cloud resources. We can also see the severity of misconfigurations, which helps us prioritize our response.”
“Security Health Analytics has really helped us reduce the amount of time we spend trying to figure out what’s wrong with our resources. It’s allowed us to use our time more effectively to identify and resolve more security issues than we could before.”
A new identity solution
AirAsia had also used a legacy on-premises directory for many years. However, as the company grew and expanded to new markets and regions, it had to manage multiple servers across a number of on-premises data centers and the public cloud, which proved costly and time-consuming.
Its Allstars—the airline’s name for its employees—needed to easily access a number of legacy on-premises apps in addition to a growing number of SaaS apps. As a business, it also needed a more seamless integration between its HR system of record and its identity solution for user provisioning and life cycle management. Solving these challenges with its existing on-premises directory was simply not feasible.
AirAsia brought up its identity concerns with the Google Cloud team, and after a number of conversations, decided to deploy Cloud Identity, Google’s cloud-based Identity and Access Management solution, to help address the identity challenges it was facing.
The airline chose Cloud Identity for a number of reasons—first, it was eager to move to the cloud as quickly as possible. Moving identity management to the cloud was a key enabler of this and the airline’s broader digital transformation. Managing identities from the cloud also enabled the airline to have a single identity and set of credentials for each employee, which they could use to access all the applications they need to be productive, both in the cloud and on-premises.
In addition, deploying Cloud Identity was a key step towards enabling the zero trust security model, which the airline felt was the best approach to strengthen its security posture and fight modern threats. Cloud Identity also integrated seamlessly with its existing technologies, which include not only Google Cloud products like G Suite and Chrome OS but also third-party tools like Citrix, Papercut, and others.
And finally, Cloud Identity offered significant cost and resource savings. With Cloud Identity in place, AirAsia’s IT department could spend less time worrying about managing multiple on-premises directory servers and and could instead focus on delivering value to Allstar employees.
Machine learning employed to increase ancillary revenue
In March 2018, AirAsia established the groundwork to use machine learning to optimize pricing for a range of services and began by using AI Platform to sort and predict demand for ancillary services such as baggage, seats, and meals. “By using AI Platform, we can sort based on data about history to predict the future,” says Kong Wei.
Dialogflow in wide use
With Google Cloud well established within the business, AirAsia is using Dialogflow, a voice and conversational interface development suite (and one of the core components of Contact Center AI) that enables businesses to create engaging AI powered voice- and text-based interfaces such as chatbots and voice apps—to streamline operations and reduce costs
“Tony Fernandes, our Group Chief Executive Officer, motivated us to create a range of metrics that would enable us to respond more quickly and efficiently to customers,” says Yuashini Vellasamy, Product Manager at AirAsia.
This resulted in the initial deployment of Dialogflow in AirAsia’s operational areas, from crew scheduling to internal business tasks.
With Dialogflow, AirAsia is able to provide pilots, crew, catering, and other teams with flight times, capacity and any other relevant information about their assignments. Another bot accepts medical certificates and updates from pilots and crew members unable to make rostered assignments and switches those assignments to other pilots and crews. “This improves our on-time performance and operational efficiency, as we are able to optimize the creation of crew schedules,” says Vellasamy.
AirAsia also uses Dialogflow to power a “safety bot” for airport ground staff. “We tried a lot of tools to encourage staff to advise us when they saw a safety issue—but employee usage was low,” says Vellasamy. “However, when we set up the safety bot, which asks users just four questions about an issue they have observed, we saw an increase in employee interaction, which helps ensure proper safety measures.
Beyond crew optimization and overall safety, AirAsia’s HR department in Asia uses a Dialogflow-powered bot to run a post-orientation engagement program for new employees. The bot follows up with employees about issues from parking to AirAsia’s onboarding buddy program, saving HR employees time from scheduling one-on-one meetings. Dialogflow also powered an employee satisfaction survey of 3,000 team members, resulting in a 30% increase in response rate compared to the previous year.
One of Dialogflow’s benefits is its language coverage, which the airline’s marketing team uses to target customers and prospects across a region with diverse languages and cultures. “For weekly campaigns and promotions, our sales and marketing teams simply update the campaign materials and the changes are reflected automatically in Dialogflow and consequently to users,” says Vellasamy. “This enables us to quickly scale and reach our customers globally.”
An upward trajectory
AirAsia is poised to reap further benefits from Google Cloud as its deployment matures. “On the data side, we’re more advanced, while on the application and programming side we have a long way to go,” says Kong Wei. “We’re on a trajectory upwards—we’re looking at a lot of new ideas and how to embrace and deploy them so we can further our data-first and digital airline agendas.”
Google Cloud Accelerates Financial Organizations’ Journey towards Digital Transformation

10470
Of your peers have already read this article.
2:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
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.
4420
Of your peers have already watched this video.
1:32 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
How the UK’s Football Association Turns to Tech to Ensure its 29 Teams Deliver World-Class Performance
The FA is an iconic British institution responsible for overseeing all aspects of football in the UK, from the grassroots club level across the country to the national teams who play at Wembley.
However, even icons like The FA must evolve to stay at the top of their game and they realized their old methods of pen and paper needed to change.
So The FA partnered with Google Cloud to transform itself into a digital leader. The first step was to implement G Suite to get all 29 professional national teams on the same page.
For all 350+ staff at St. George’s Park training facility and coaches throughout the country and on the road, G Suite provides an intuitive and easy way for all these entities to work together.
Coaches could communicate through Hangout; analysts could
compile and share data in Sheets; AI training plans could be distributed
and executed using Slides; and Drive helped support players on the
move, giving immediate access to important information, like dietary
requirements, training data, travel docs and more.
Watch the video to find out more.
More Relevant Stories for Your Company

Video: How Whirlpool’s 90,000 Employees Collaborate to Bring 100 New Products to Market Every Year
As one of the world’s largest manufacturing companies, Whirlpool needs no introduction. The 104-year-old company manufactures home appliances from over 70 manufacturing and technology research centers around the world. Innovation has been the company’s focus since its inception and that’s evident from the fact that it introduced close to 100

How 4K+ Coffee Lovers Get their Cuppa at Costa Coffee with the Help of Google Maps
Editor’s note: Gordon Lucas, Global Head of Digital Engineering at Costa Coffee, explains how Google Maps Platform helps direct customers to each of its 4,000 plus Costa Coffee shops across the world, as well as streamline payments, and optimize deliveries. When brothers Sergio and Bruno Costa opened the first Costa

On-Demand Webinar: How Technology is Creating a Smaller World to Help Businesses Grow Big
Consider this: In a pre-cloud world, it took the telephone 75 years, automobiles 62 years, and TVs 14 years to reach 50 million customers. But today’s innovations have narrowed that gap. In comparison, it took Netflix only 7 years to reach 50 million customers, while Twitter got there in just

Guide to Google’s Underwater Infrastructure
From data centers and cloud regions to subsea cables, Google is committed to connecting the world. Our investments in infrastructure aim to further improve our network—one of the world’s largest—which helps improve global connectivity, supporting users and Google Cloud customers. Our subsea cables play a starring role in this work,






