The data is protected by the IT staffers. It doesn't matter if they are your employees or of a cloud provider's.
I'd rather have security experts who are Harvard/ MIT/ Stanford graduates with experience in Google, Microsoft and IBM and who are paid more than $100 000 yearly protect my data than those I could hire with much much less experience and skill.
The only thing you should pay attention to is the SLA. Try to contact multiple cloud vendors find the most suitable one and try to negotiate a SLA that best suits your needs.
However, if the data is critical and you're bound by compliance regulations, the best solution here is a hybrid/private cloud. Banking nowadays still relies heavily on mainframes but the hybrid/private cloud does really give the same level of hightened security and comes at a greatly cheaper price.