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HSBC Looks to Google Cloud to Transform Banking
HSBC, a global bank that is a central part of global commerce with a presence in 67 countries, serving 38 million customers ranging from individuals to small businesses to corporations and governments, and having over $2.5 trillion assets in its balance sheet, had a vision of being a cloud first company and wanted to transform the banking experience for its customers.
The bank wanted to glean valuable insights from its huge data asset of about 100 petabytes and wanted to use those insights to manage its business better. What it needed was a managed service with elastic capability so that HSBC can focus on the data science and management, which enables better customer experience.
For many years HSBC had, like most large corporations, tried to build its own data centers, provision the infrastructure, and run it. However, to realize its ambition of focussing on customer experience, the bank decided to partner with Google Cloud.
However, the journey wasn’t an easy one. Being a globally systemically important financial institution, it had to convince regulators across the world that moving customer data to the cloud is a good thing. Towards that end, it formed a joint team to work through all the challenges and created a cloud framework for banking describing the controls needed.
The results have been quite stunning. Able to calculate the global liquidity for a country in minutes rather than hours, run better financial crime analytics with speeds that are 10 times faster with a higher level of precision and accuracy have been some of the benefits that the bank has derived.
See how HSBC and Google Cloud are bringing a new level of security, compliance and governance capabilities to one of the world’s leading banking institutions.
Hike: Processing Analytics Queries 20X Faster with Google Cloud Platform
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After a seamless migration to Google Cloud Platform with CloudCover and Google Cloud Professional Services, Hike has reduced its costs by 20% and processed analytics queries 20 times faster than with its previous cloud provider. The business is also using AI and machine learning to enhance the experience provided by a new sticker-based messaging app, Hike Sticker Chat.
India is a market of opportunity for businesses that provide messaging apps to consumers. With more than 1.3 billion people, the country is the second most populous in the world. However, global messaging app providers face a robust market challenge from Hike, a home-grown internet and technology startup. Launched in 2012, Hike provides innovative products such as Hike Messenger and more recently the AI- and machine-learning-enabled Hike Sticker Chat, a service that enables young people in the country to express themselves through digital stickers.
The business says it understands the people of India and communication like no one else, while its mission is to reduce individuals’ dependency on the keyboard. To do this, Hike is building one of the largest repositories of AI and machine-learning-enabled stickers for Hike Sticker Chat. This messaging platform is, according to Hike, the only product of its type that enables conversations through stickers covering more than 40 languages and local dialects.
Google Cloud Results
- Processes analytics queries 20X faster than previously
- Doubles compute throughput
- Uses Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine managed, distributed capabilities to train complex models on TensorFlow that provide delightful local sticker recommendations through Hike Sticker Chat
Founded by Kavin Bharti Mittal, the Delhi-based venture is backed by SoftBank, Tencent, Tiger Global, Foxconn, and Bharti. To date, Hike has raised $261 million in funding. In August 2016, Hike raised its Series D round of funding, led by Tencent and Foxconn, at a valuation of $1.4 billion. The business is one of the fastest Indian startups to achieve Unicorn status, doing so in less than four years.
Hike started operations on a multinational cloud service. However, as user numbers and usage grew, the business began exploring options to improve performance and stability, reduce costs, and cut administration loads. In particular, Hike wanted to reduce latency between cloud data centers.
Focus on product development
“We aimed to move away from a technology stack with single points of failure to a horizontally scaled, highly reliable, distributed systems and managed services environment that enabled us to focus on product development rather than operations,” says Aditya Gupta, Director, Engineering, Hike.
Hike then began exploring the opportunities presented by Google Cloud Platform. The business held a number of executive-level meetings with Google to understand the capabilities, roadmap, and track record of the cloud service. It then decided to proceed with a proof of concept with Google Cloud Premier Partner CloudCover.
The proof of concept revealed that when Cloud Load Balancing was operating, latency between the Google Cloud data center in Taiwan and Delhi, India, was less than the latency between the incumbent cloud provider’s data center and Delhi. Further, compute throughput was up to two times greater on Compute Engine than on the equivalent service, while Hike could complete more then 1 million connections on Compute Engine – up from 500,000 connections on the incumbent service.
Migrate to GCP
The success of the exercise prompted Hike to migrate its messaging app to Google Cloud Platform. “We chose Google Cloud Platform because of its very broad set of services and features,” explains Gupta. “In addition, Google’s innovation mindset and the richness of the partnership would allow us to be onboarded quickly to machine learning services such as Cloud Machine Learning Engine.”
The business called on Google Cloud Professional Services (Technical Account Management) to help ensure a seamless lift-and-shift migration over two months. Google Cloud Professional Services initially undertook a technical infrastructure kickoff to establish a foundation for architecture requirements such as identity and access management and security.
Google Cloud Professional Services team delivers smooth migration
Google Cloud Professional Services worked closely with Hike to map out and deliver the Google Cloud Platform architecture that would deliver the greatest value to the business. The Professional Services team also worked with Hike to resolve product and support queries quickly; provided project background for product and support teams; and organized project meetings and early adopter program access.
In addition, Professional Services team members worked on site at least once a week, coordinated external support during critical migration periods, and coordinated teams in five countries for a single, 17-hour migration marathon. Over 60 days, the business migrated 7,000 processor cores, running virtual machine instances used for messaging infrastructure and analytics, to Google Cloud Platform.
Throughout the exercise, Google Cloud Professional Services worked with CloudCover to educate the customers’ technology teams to achieve proficiency with Google Cloud Platform. The teams soon built up skills and knowledge of best practices and began applying them to the Google Cloud Platform environment.
The Hike Google Cloud Platform architecture comprises virtual machine instances running in Compute Engine; Cloud Storage for unified object storage; networking; a BigQuery analytics data warehouse; Cloud Dataflow to transform and enrich data; Cloud Load Balancing to distribute workloads to maximize efficiency; and Cloud Dataproc to run Hadoop clusters.
Hike is also stepping up its AI & machine learning capabilities. It uses Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine managed, distributed computing capabilities to train complex models on TensorFlow. This powers key use cases such as delightful local sticker recommendations on Hike Sticker Chat. Hike is also investing heavily on AI and machine learning research.
Hike has achieved a range of benefits from its Google Cloud Platform deployment. As well as reduced latency, improved compute throughput, and increased connection handling, Google Cloud Platform managed services have enabled the business to reduce the time and effort required to administer core infrastructure, with the saved resources allocated to improving its messaging product.
“Managed services are beginning to reduce our operational overheads,” says Gupta. “For example, managed instance groups and Cloud Load Balancing are reducing our instance count and costs, thereby reducing involvement from DevOps and developer teams.”
Google Cloud Platform 20% cheaper
Gupta and his team have calculated that running for three years on Google Cloud Platform will cost, including the cost of migration, 20 percent less than on its previous platform. BigQuery is processing queries 20 times faster than a similar service offered by the previous provider, while storing 125TB of data and streaming 1.5TB of data daily. Furthermore, Hike’s analytics pipeline costs 80 percent less than in its previous environment.
“Google Cloud Platform has played an important role in enabling us to continue to innovate and realize our mission of reducing dependency on the keyboard,” says Gupta.
How Do You Cut Costs and Improve Staff Productivity, and Business Visibility? Ascend Money Has an Answer
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Hundreds of millions of residents of South East Asia have only limited access to banking and finance services. However, help is at hand. One of South East Asia’s largest fintech businesses, Ascend Money is using digital technologies to realize its mission of enabling as many people as possible to access innovative financial services and live better lives.
According to Ascend Money, 60 percent of the region’s 620 million residents do not have access to a full suite of financial services. Even a relatively small proportion of this market represents a big opportunity for the business.
Ascend Money’s offerings include the TrueMoney regional payment platform for underserved and digital consumers. The TrueMoney platform supports more than 40 million consumers across six countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
“We found, based on value, ease of use, effectiveness, and the skills and adaptability of our own team members, BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform services were the best fit for our business.”
– Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money
TrueMoney also provides an e-wallet app that provides easy ways to top up mobile phones, undertake online shopping, and pay for products and services; a network of 65,000 branded shops; and international remittances, initially between Thailand and Myanmar. In addition, Ascend Money offers financial products to small to medium businesses.
Ascend Money is part of the South East Asian online business Ascend Group, which also operates e-commerce, e-procurement, data centers, cloud services, fulfilment, and digital marketing services.
Cost is a key criteria
Ascend Money initially started operations using physical infrastructure and on-premises workforce productivity applications. However, as the business grew its customer base and expanded into new markets, its technology leaders began to explore options to improve value for money; reduce the maintenance load on in-house team members; improve its data management and analysis; and collaborate more effectively.
“Operating our own on-premises infrastructure entails a higher cost of ownership and maintenance, as well as requiring us to scale up our hardware as needed,” says Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money. “We conducted an evaluation and found that moving to the cloud would deliver a range of benefits.”
G Suite and Google Cloud Platform the best fit
The business evaluated solutions available in the market and opted to move to G Suite and Google Cloud Platform.
“Moving to Google Cloud Platform was an optimization exercise, with lowering our costs our primary goal, and achieving better performance an added benefit,” says Jarrett. Google Cloud Platform monitoring, diagnostic, and analytics tools have enabled Ascend Money to reduce its infrastructure spending, becoming more efficient and cost-effective in the process.
“Managing software is a big cost for us. Through G Suite, we are significantly reducing our software deployment, licensing, and repair costs.”
– Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money
The Ascend Money team saw Google Kubernetes Engine as enabling a seamless way of transitioning from an on-premises data center to a cloud service. “We considered industry trends such as what people were adopting and who we could hire when making our decision,” says Jarrett. “Engineering teams are focusing on using Kubernetes open source container management at scale and as a way of doing business, which was attractive to us.
“Google Kubernetes Engine presented the easiest way to manage and orchestrate our containers, and drive us away from our existing infrastructure.”
BigQuery best for cost and ease of use
Ascend Money also reviewed data infrastructure solutions, with its business intelligence and data platform teams considering a range of options. The teams quickly ruled out an on-premises solution due to the capital investment required and opted for a cloud service. Following a rigorous evaluation of Google Cloud Platform against the services offered by another cloud provider, Ascend Money opted to run on Google Cloud.
“We found, based on value, ease of use, effectiveness, and the skills and adaptability of our own team members, BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform services were the best fit for our business,” says Jarrett. The business is now running an architecture comprising a BigQuery analytics data warehouse; Cloud Storage to store raw and archive data; Cloud Dataflow to process stream and batch data, and Cloud Pub/Sub for event ingestion and delivery.
“We’re expanding our utilization of BigQuery and other services on a daily basis,” says Jarrett.
Ascend Money is also using a range of Google Cloud Platform services for the infrastructure outside its data platform, including Stackdriver logging and monitoring; Cloud KMS to manage cryptographic keys for its cloud services, Cloud Build to undertake continuous integration, delivery, and deployment; Cloud DNS to provide domain name system services; and Cloud Functions to enable its developers to run and scale code in the cloud.
With Google Cloud Platform, Ascend Money is now processing about 12GB of batch data per day and streaming data from about 200 data marts per day in Thailand alone.
Cost effective scalability and faster to market
Google Kubernetes Engine has enabled the business to scale and deliver to market faster. “We can build on the platform, take the application and container and deploy them to scale out,” says Jarrett. “The Google Kubernetes Engine orchestration mechanism that provides containerized, elastic scalability is extremely important in allowing us to manage costs and expend our effort efficiently. Through Kubernetes, we can write once and deploy everywhere.”
With Google Cloud Platform, the business has saved 3,000,000 THB (about US$90,000) in licensing costs and, through automation tools, reduced the time to complete infrastructure activities by 50 percent.
“We don’t have as many meetings since we deployed G Suite and we can work effectively in a distributed fashion.”
– Abraham Jarrett, Head of Engineering, Ascend Money
Ascend Money’s entire workforce is now using G Suite to collaborate and operate productively. The business is achieving a range of benefits including being able to get new team members up and running more quickly and reduced cost. “Managing software is a big cost for us,” says Jarrett. “Through G Suite, we are significantly reducing our software deployment, licensing, and repair costs.” Meanwhile, the shorter time to onboard team members to G Suite is paying off with improved productivity and an accelerated ability to collaborate.
Ascend Money team members primarily use Sheets, Slides, and Docs to create internal materials, including product requirement documents in Docs and workforce and project planning spreadsheets in Sheets.
The organization also uses Hangouts Meet to collaborate when working from different locations. “We don’t have as many meetings since we deployed G Suite and we can work effectively in a distributed fashion,” says Jarrett. “People can work from home and we have five regions plus Thailand where they can collaborate live on a document, such as a slide deck for board meetings or meetings with our chief executive officer, head of engineering, or other senior managers.”
20 hours per week saved
Jarrett describes the time savings of using web browser-based productivity software and G Suite as saving them an average of 20 hours per week. This has improved productivity and the quality of life for Ascend Money’s hard-working team, increasing overall staff satisfaction.
“The ability to work remotely is a big win for us,” Jarrett says. “Our team members can keep one computer at work and one at home and access the same information, they can work in a plane while it sits on the tarmac, or update a Google Doc or a Google Sheet in real time on their phone. They can work anytime, from any location, as long as they have an internet connection. They have less dead time, meaning more uptime.”
With Google Cloud Platform and G Suite, Ascend Money is ideally positioned to support growing demand for its fintech services in South East Asia, particularly among people with limited access to banking. “We have the agility and dynamism to support rising demand and look forward to continuing to work with Google to realize our business ambitions,” says Jarrett.
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The banking and financial services industry (BFSI) in India is going through a period of unprecedented innovation.
Customers in India have more information than ever before to make better-informed decisions and can pick the banking and other financial services they need from a wide range of providers.
New players like fintech startups and large tech firms are responding to changing customer expectations with faster, better, and cheaper services, altering the competitive landscape.
However, many BFSI executives are still exploring the potential of digital technologies in pockets of their firms or striving to digitize the customer lifecycles from end to end. To succeed, BFSI firms must increasingly focus on how to deliver on customer outcomes through digital customer experience, digital operational excellence, digital innovation, and digital ecosystems.
Forward-thinking BFSI firms are increasingly turning to cloud to support their businesses as they attempt to keep pace with evolving customer needs. Cloud has become a strategic priority; ensuring its support in the market will only enable digital business and accelerate innovation.
Find out cloud adoption trends in Indian BFSI, including the perceived
challenges, drivers, and benefits of cloud investments.
Download Forrester’s Report today.
Why Indian Enterprises Need to Embrace The Cloud-First Imperative to Accelerate Digital Transformation
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Digital transformation is rewriting the rules of business both in India and worldwide. Digital customer experiences deliver easy, effective, and emotional touchpoints that focus operations on what the customers value. Around half of Indian decision makers prioritize the improvement of CX and the simplification of operations, as top priorities in their business agenda, according to a Forrester Consulting study of 360 business and technology decision makers of Indian enterprises.
According to the study, forward-thinking enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud to support their business as they attempt to keep pace with evolving customer needs. As a result, cloud has become a strategic priority, and ensuring its support in the marketplace will only enable digital business and accelerate innovation.
The study reveals that:
- Public cloud is a key enabler for the transformation of digital business.
- Security, inconsistent monitoring tools, and legacy applications are top barriers to public cloud expansion.
- Enterprises are expanding their adoption of the public cloud and want to gain a competitive edge.
Download this study to understand why more and more organizations are moving applications to the cloud in order to take advantage of scalability, lower capital costs, ease of operations, and the resilience offered by the public cloud.
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Enterprises developing digital leadership are increasingly moving out of their data centers to focus on core business innovation, and save on complex infrastructure costs. This puts challenges related to demand peaks and business continuity under a magnifying glass.
Many CIOs are under pressure to complete migrations quickly — 68% of CIOs are seeking to migrate existing applications to the cloud, according to Forrester. Motivations range from cost or risk reductions, to refocusing on agility and speed.
As they assess their options, many enterprises face an enormous challenge of balancing the function of their existing infrastructure with a new operating model in the cloud. This involves thousands of variables, different technologies, different processes and skills, disparate teams, and competing interests.
Download this guide and see hoo to craft a strategy out of the data center and into public cloud. It surfaces typical industry patterns, key dimensions to be taken into account while designing the journey, as well as Google’s capabilities and approach to executing a successful modernization, to help you drive lower costs and increased agility.
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