Metro Bank Embraces The Cloud And Goes Paperless

Metro Bank is continuing to develop a “paperless culture,” as it embraces cloud technology and tablet devices.

Bruce Rioch, the firm’s head of business information and customer systems, explained that the by adopting new technology Metro Bank is able to provide a better service for its customers.

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“We’re saving thousands and thousands of pieces of paper,” he said. “If you walk into a Metro Bank store and open a bank account, we will actually get you to sign the account declaration on screen,” he said during his talk at Convergence 2015.

“We’ll get you to sign terms and conditions on the screen and then we will actually email that directly to you, rather than print 28 pages of terms and condition you quite frankly don’t want to take out with you anyway.”

The financial sector, and banking in particular, has been reticent to adopt the cloud due to security concerns and regulations governing the location and storage of sensitive data. However, as one of the only banks to emerge in recent years, Metro Bank appears more open to innovative new approaches.

The company has adopted a hybrid cloud approach, which enables it to benefit from the agility and flexibility of the public cloud, without compromising its customers’ security. Instead, sensitive data is stored via Temenos’ banking software on the company’s two private data centres.

For its public cloud services, Metro Bank relies heavily on Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of tools and Lync, the company’s communication software that is soon to be rebranded as Skype for Business. The decision to use Lync has enabled the firm to eliminate desk phones from its operations, enabling it to further streamline the business.

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While there have been long-running concerns over the security of the cloud versus on-premise operations, the fact that Metro Bank is willing to outsource so much of its business suggests that these concerns are abating.