With the continuous growth of China’s economy over the recent years, the small- and medium-sized financial institutions have also witnessed rapid development. According to statistics of China Banking Regulatory Commission, the urban commercial banks and rural financial institutions have outplayed the large state-owned commercial banks in terms of total assets growth rate in recent years. By the end of December 2011, the total assets of urban commercial banks registered a year-on-year growth rate of 26.6%, much higher than that of state-owned commercial banks, which was 16.8% year-on-year.
The rapid development of small and medium-sized financial institutions has boosted the development of IT application in the financial industry. As small and medium-sized financial institutions need to reduce investment costs and accelerate their own business development, building the public cloud will undoubtedly be the best choice, which will be a new type of data center outsourcing service. Various application platforms will provide all kinds of settlement services for small and medium-sized banks, saving them from building application systems on their own. In this case, the small and medium-sized financial enterprises no longer have to build data centers and they can throw all technical problems with software and hardware to the cloud computing service providers. Besides, the use-on-demand and pay-per-use delivery model can also significantly cut the construction and operation costs.
According to statistics of CCID Consulting, China’s financial application of cloud computing yielded a revenue of RMB 15.62 in 2011, up 48.2% year-on-year and accounting for 9.5% of overall cloud computing application market. The small and medium-sized financial institutions, contributing 20% of the revenue, are an important force in promoting the rapid development of cloud computing application in the financial industry. For instance, banks in villages and towns of Jiangsu, Henan and other provinces and cities have carried out informatization construction through managed cloud services. Thealliance of urban commercial banks of Shandong Province also actively deployed cloud service platforms for its 14 member banks, providing unified IT system and product development, data operation maintenance, gross settlement and business operation platform services.
