First bank in the cloud appears on the horizon as climate now ripe for migration

The development of a domestic bank hosted entirely in the cloud is not far off, says Bradley Sacks, joint CEO of JSE-listed Capital Appreciation.

Global banks and companies such as Disney and Netflix were migrating most of their infrastructure to the cloud, rather than relying on their own data centres, Sacks said.

Domestically, the Reserve Bank was open to cloud computing, which referred to an internet platform for database storage, while banks favoured a hybrid model.

Capital Appreciation, which owns fintech companies African Resonance, Dashpay and Synthesis, provides technology solutions to local banks, insurers and asset managers.

Migration to the cloud would grow as companies sought greater agility, Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy said at its re:Invent conference in 2016. The need to reduce the regulatory burden and the cost of delivering banking services was driving banks’ expenditure on technology, said Sacks.

Capital Appreciation subsidiaries would benefit from technology spend by banks, which preferred to focus on their core business and maintaining customer relationships.

The firm continued to hunt for acquisitions, Sacks said.