Payments providers this week confirmed strong progress on cloud migration initiatives, with several organisations reporting that key milestones have now been reached.
Executives cited the successful completion of strategy phases, target-state design, reference architecture development and vendor selection as evidence that momentum is building across the sector.
"We're well under way," one leader said. "The foundations are in place."
The foundations include a landing zone, a steering committee, and a PowerPoint deck showing how the platform will look once migrated.
Actual workloads remain on-premise.
Early Wins
Several firms noted that early wins have already been realised, including improved alignment between technology, risk, compliance and procurement teams, who now meet weekly to discuss cloud readiness.
Cloud readiness was described as "encouraging".
Migration itself is expected to begin once assurance is achieved. Assurance requires further assessment. The assessment will commence following the next budget cycle.
In the meantime, organisations confirmed they remain cloud-first in principle.
The principle is stored securely on-premise.
The Vendor Question
Multiple cloud vendors confirmed they are engaged in active discussions with the institutions. The discussions have been active since 2022. One vendor described the pipeline as "very encouraging". A second described it as "mature". A third confirmed it has been reclassified as "strategic" twice.
"We are not a lift-and-shift organisation. We are a thoughtful cloud adopter. That takes time. The time is being taken very carefully."
When asked when the first production workload would migrate, the executive confirmed the timeline would be communicated following the completion of the current phase, which is the fourth phase since the programme was initiated in 2021.
What Is In The Cloud
The Immutable Ledger obtained a list of workloads currently running in the cloud at one major Australian financial institution. The list includes: the staff intranet, a test environment for a decommissioned product, twelve development sandboxes, and a SharePoint instance that nobody uses but that costs $4,200 per month.
Core banking, payments processing, risk systems, and settlement engines remain on-premise. They are described as candidates for future migration "once the foundational work is complete".
The foundational work began in 2020. It is expected to complete in 2027, subject to board sign-off, vendor availability, and the resolution of seventeen open risk items of which three are described as "critical" and fourteen as "high".
