The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Establishes Financial Sector Cloud Resilience Forum

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) Establishes Financial Sector Cloud Resilience Forum

2023-04-14

Cloud Computing continues its growth

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has enjoyed increased popularity across all sectors in recent years, and shows no sign of slowing.  Gartner predicts that global public cloud spending on SaaS will jump to $208,080 million in 2023, up 18% from the previous year.

In the Banking sector the use of cloud providers, whilst initially treated with some scepticism, particularly regarding the security of data and ensuring appropriate controls, has also seen substantial growth, and has been  widely acknowledged as having a significant role to play in Banks’ ability to provide innovative products and services to clients.

 

Can SaaS adoption be expedited with support from Regulators?

The ability to use cloud, and the reduction in earlier concerns, has been supported in recent years by the likes of the European Banking Authority (EBA), Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Bank of England (BoE) and the U.S. Department of the Treasury providing guidance and advice on both outsourcing and the use of cloud services.

Perhaps it is this guidance that has meant that VERMEG has enjoyed success with its SaaS RegTech offering in Europe and USA, but take up of SaaS in Asia Pacific has been slower? And perhaps this might change soon…

 

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) establishes Financial Sector Cloud Resilience Forum across APAC Financial regulators and Cloud Service Providers

On the 4th April the MAS hosted the inaugural Financial Sector Cloud Resilience Forum (Forum) for Asia Pacific financial regulators and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) with a view to exchanging views on appropriate public cloud risk management practices for the financial sector.

The Forum saw the predominant Cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure joined by more than 20 participants from financial regulatory authorities from other countries including Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysian, Philippines, and Thailand.

 

So, what were the key takeaways?

The Forum noted that along with increasing adoption, there were already some critical systems and processes that are already being hosted in the public cloud.

The participants stressed the importance for financial regulators, firms and cloud providers to jointly create best practices around resilience and security, to ensure services meet the high level of standards that the Finance sector warrants.

The participants also called for greater information sharing between financial regulators and cloud providers across cloud technology and risk management practices in order to build strong competencies to address risks that may be unique to public cloud deployment.

 

How can VERMEG help?

VERMEG have been supporting our RegTech clients to lower their cost of compliance and streamline their operations with AGILE Reporter via SaaS for many years now and understand the importance to clients of strong security and controls when taking out such a service.

With a focus on continuous service improvement, and after successfully obtaining SOC 2 type I, VERMEG further enhanced its security policies and procedures by additionally embracing the SOC 2 type II standard to increase the level of security of its already resilient SaaS offering.

SOC 2 is an internationally recognized auditing standard developed by the “American Institute of Certified Public Accountants” and covers a wide number of security best practices including risk management, logical access controls, system access, and the controls and processes involved in storing, handling and transmitting data securely.

Whilst the recent forum placed an emphasis on firms and cloud providers collaborating, we believe that individual service providers can also play an important role in providing the necessary reassurances around the provision of its services in order to continue the drive towards a wider spread adoption of cloud, and we look forward to playing our part.

https://www.mas.gov.sg/news/media-releases/2023/mas-establishes-financial-sector-cloud-resilience-forum

 

 

Pavan Kumar Pothuraju

Pavan Pothuraju

Head of Regulatory Product Management – APAC

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