In late 2020, IBM brought together CIOs and CTOs from a handful of global systematically important banks for a virtual meeting. The agenda included setting up a charter to form a group that will focus on materially reducing the risk of cloud consumption across the financial services industry. One of the first initiatives of this group was to establish a standard set of controls that can be applied to cloud, fintechs and SaaS providers consistently. The group adopted the name of IBM Financial Services Cloud Council (FS Council), ratified a charter and started focusing on an innovative new construct for public cloud, enabling cloud adoption for mission critical workloads in this highly regulated sector.
In Spring of 2024, we onboarded our 100th financial services organization to the FS Council. The group, which originally started as a representation of top global banks has now flourished into a dynamic and engaging community consisting of 160+ CIOs, CTOs, CISO and CROs representing technology, security and risk leaders from the world’s largest banks to regional and community banks and credit unions representing over 20 countries in Americas, Europe, APAC and LATAM.
The FS Council is focused on identifying and addressing tough industry problems. Some of the key accomplishments of the council to-date include:
- IBM Cloud Framework for Financial Services: An industry’s first comprehensive controls framework co-developed with members of the FS Council and kept aligned to industry standards and regulatory requirements across the globe.
- Hybrid Cloud Performance & Risk Metrics: A standardized way of measuring risk and performance in a hybrid cloud environment.
- Workload & Data Placement Strategy: A methodical way to address workload data and data placement strategy in hybrid cloud with performance, security, and resilience.
- Testing Operational Resilience: Leading practices shared by FS Council members on operational resilience testing methodology and scenarios to meet growing expectations from regulators across the globe.
- Hybrid-Multi Cloud Risk Visibility & Management: An automated and unified security, compliance, and risk visibility approach across hybrid multi-cloud environments.
- Safe, Secure & Compliant Adoption of Gen AI: An industry first purpose-built framework for responsible and secure adoption of Gen AI.
- Digital Supply Chain (3rd/4th Party) Control and Validation Approach: A comprehensive approach for ISVs, SaaS solutions, fintechs and CSP controls implementation and on-going effectiveness and monitoring across the full stack.
Details on these Council contributions and many more can be found on the Financial Services Cloud Council and Forum.
In driving these various initiatives, the FS Council continues to develop deeper relationships with regulators across the globe and built alliances and partnerships with industry trade organizations and forums.
Thank you to the 100 financial services institutions for their leadership and willingness to come together for the greater good. I am excited about all that this group will achieve in the future.
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