{"id":104314,"date":"2026-07-13T16:47:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T16:47:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/104314\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T16:47:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T16:47:11","slug":"why-cloud-is-the-missing-link-in-banking-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/104314\/","title":{"rendered":"Why cloud is the missing link in banking AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI projects are stalling everywhere in the banking industry<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Boards have approved the budgets, pilot projects are running, there\u2019s a roadmap full of use cases, and the models are working \u2026 but not much is changing. <\/p>\n

When it\u2019s time to plug AI into payments, credit decisions and customer journeys, performance stalls as integrations get messy and compliance flags issues.<\/p>\n

The ambition is there, but the reality is that they\u2019re short on the foundation needed to make it real.<\/p>\n

Research from our global report, Cloud-led innovation in the era of AI: The new rules for driving value with cloud<\/a>,\u00a0shows that although a staggering 98% of banking and investment organizations say the rise of AI has increased their need for cloud investment, only 14% consider themselves to be at the highest level of cloud maturity.<\/p>\n

The bottleneck isn\u2019t AI; it\u2019s the cloud behind it<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a tendency to treat AI<\/a>\u00a0itself as the hard part. While implementing and managing models and algorithms can be complex, it\u2019s rarely what holds things back. The issue is that AI is only as effective as the environment it runs in.<\/p>\n

For example, a fraud-detection model can flag a suspicious transaction in milliseconds, but it may take minutes to pull the right data. And if the system can\u2019t trigger an action in real time, or can\u2019t act without manual intervention. the value is lost. The insight exists, but the platform can\u2019t act on it.<\/p>\n

To help organizations avoid these bottlenecks, cloud<\/a>\u00a0has become the execution layer of AI \u2014 the place where decisions are made, workflows are triggered and systems scale under pressure.<\/p>\n

However, after years of cloud migration, many banks are still treating cloud as a place to host applications, not a platform to run the business and carry the weight of AI. <\/p>\n

Legacy infrastructure is not solely to blame<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to blame legacy systems \u2014 and yes, they\u2019re part of the problem. But migrating to the cloud doesn\u2019t help much if data is still scattered across systems and applications remain tightly coupled, with fragile integrations between them. When AI enters the picture, it will hit the same walls.<\/p>\n

This is why so many AI programs feel stuck. They\u2019ve been deployed but not fully embedded, and it shows in the data. Half the organizations surveyed for our report say the need to modernize applications and data platforms is holding back cloud innovation. <\/p>\n

So, AI doesn\u2019t break because models fail but because the systems around them can\u2019t support their reliance on real-time data, event-driven decisions and continuous change. <\/p>\n

What \u201cmodern cloud\u201d means in the AI era<\/p>\n

Modernization is often discussed in the wrong way. Rather than just moving workloads from one place to another, it\u2019s meant to change how entire systems behave.<\/p>\n

When customers open their banking app, check their balance and get a personalized offer in real time, based on market conditions, risk signals and transaction history, several things have to happen instantly:<\/p>\n

The data has to be available and up to date.The systems need to talk to each other without interruption. Decisions have to trigger actions automatically.Everything must be governed and auditable. <\/p>\n

In other words, cloud needs to operate as three things at once in the era of AI: a real-time data backbone, a platform where intelligent workflows run end to end, and a controlled environment where decisions can scale safely.<\/p>\n

This can be achieved only through cloud-native design \u2014 event-based, modular systems, driven by application programming interfaces, that can evolve without disrupting what\u2019s around them.<\/p>\n

Architecture is now a regulatory decision<\/p>\n

Banking is a highly regulated industry. As AI becomes embedded in core workflows, regulators are scrutinizing both the models and the environments they run in. Banks must comply with regulations such as the European Union\u2019s Digital Operational Resilience Act<\/a>\u00a0and India\u2019s Digital Personal Data Protection Act<\/a>. <\/p>\n

An NTT DATA report on AI leaders in banking and financial services<\/a>\u00a0shows that 62.5% of these organizations flag cross-geography data privacy and sovereignty as top governance concerns.<\/p>\n

This is why, more broadly, 99% of organizations in our cloud research<\/a>\u00a0expect private cloud adoption to increase, driven by security, sovereignty and compliance needs,\u00a0while\u00a0sovereign cloud adoption is projected to rise by 50% in the next two years.<\/p>\n

If banks\u2019 architectures aren\u2019t designed for regulatory-grade control, their AI strategies won\u2019t scale, regardless of how strong their models are.<\/p>\n

Why cloud and AI strategies must converge<\/p>\n

We often see AI and cloud being treated as separate conversations. AI is the responsibility of innovation teams, while infrastructure teams look after cloud. But several things happen when AI and cloud strategies evolve in isolation:<\/p>\n

AI ambitions outpace what the platform can handle.Cloud investments lack a clear business purpose. Scaling becomes slower, more expensive and harder to control.<\/p>\n

Our research shows that leading organizations start with the use case and build the architecture with AI workloads in mind from day one. Data, platforms and governance are aligned up-front.<\/p>\n

This produces a very different result: AI that doesn\u2019t need to fight its environment to scale but is instead supported by it.<\/p>\n

How leaders are moving forward (and why their approach works)<\/p>\n

As banking gets smarter, agentic AI systems<\/a>\u00a0are becoming more widespread. In lending, for instance, documents can now be collected, verified, assessed and approved with minimal human intervention because an AI system is orchestrating the entire workflow and making decisions \u2014 continuously and at scale.<\/p>\n

These agentic systems are already triggering fraud investigations when anomalies appear, orchestrating complex lending and onboarding workflows, and personalizing customer interactions in real time.<\/p>\n

Any one of these AI workflows might now involve half a dozen applications, multiple data sources and, increasingly, autonomous agents that make decisions along the way. Trying to manage all this manually or through disconnected systems quickly becomes difficult.<\/p>\n

Some banks are already modernizing in layers to fix what matters most, where it matters most. Our global AI research shows that 62.5% of banking and financial services AI leaders use hybrid deployment models \u2014 combining plug-and-play solutions with selective co-innovation \u2014 compared with just 29.2% of banking and financial services laggards.<\/p>\n

This usually leads to a mix of hybrid cloud and targeted application changes, with a strong platform foundation to bring everything into one place:<\/p>\n

A clear, end-to-end view of what\u2019s happening in every systemGovernance built into how decisions are made and executed Continuous visibility of cost as AI workloads scale Automation that keeps things moving without constant intervention Fix the foundation or limit your AI future<\/p>\n

Most banks aren\u2019t operating at a level where cloud is the execution layer of AI. <\/p>\n

To get there, banking leaders need to start thinking about cloud differently. They should see their infrastructure as the foundation for how the bank runs and grows, leading to faster innovation and better margins. <\/p>\n

Only then will they maintain their competitive edge in the era of AI.<\/p>\n

This article was co-authored by Kane Stavens, Managing Director: Asia Pacific at NTT DATA.<\/p>\n

WHAT TO DO NEXT<\/p>\n

Access the NTT DATA report, Cloud-led innovation in the era of AI: The new rules for driving value with cloud<\/a>, to see how your organization\u2019s cloud maturity measures up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI projects are stalling everywhere in the banking industry. Boards have approved the budgets, pilot projects are running,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104315,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,17283,14952,25,512,54110,201,684],"class_list":["post-104314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-infrastructure-services","tag-ai-services","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-automation","tag-banking-and-financial-services","tag-cloud","tag-innovation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}