“Apps get five-star ratings when customers can quickly get the information they need,” says Jobling. “Google Cloud services have been configured and tuned to run fast. That, combined with AlloyDB, means customers go from initial face scan to seeing their balance in less than three seconds.”

Users have been quick to adopt the new channels, with 98.6% of Cynergy Bank’s active base now registered since its launch.

The scalability of its Google Cloud infrastructure is enabling Cynergy Bank to improve its services in other ways too, such as accelerating the speed with which it can assess climate risks when making lending decisions. The Financial Risk Management (FRM) function of the bank can now conduct efficient large-scale analysis that was previously time and cost intensive. For example, when lending money to customers investing in property, Cynergy Bank needs to be able to assess the risk of adverse climate events, such as floods, affecting that property. The bank previously modeled this risk using Python on local machines, but the large volumes of data meant it could take up to a week to model a single risk scenario, and at times the model would fail to run altogether, delaying the bank’s ability to make a decision. Now those models run in containers on GKE, allowing the bank to analyze large geospatial datasets with accuracy. The limitless scalability of GKE means the bank can now reliably complete risk-scenario models in just 15 minutes. As a result, Cynergy Bank’s customers benefit from the bank’s ability to make faster lending decisions.

FRM originally sought Google Cloud as a cloud-based modeling environment to expand its big-data modeling capabilities. In this context, Google Cloud has had a profound impact in supporting the bank’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) analyses. Disclosing the bank’s emissions and net-zero transition plan is an integral part of the bank’s annual accounts, helping to demonstrate how the bank is a responsible lender, managing its emissions in accordance with the UK’s guidelines. The bank is confident that the scalable computing power of Google Cloud will continue to be of great value to the bank as its modeling needs increase.

Customer experience is a key consideration for the Cynergy Bank team. With developer-friendly tools from Google Cloud, the engineering team has been able to dedicate more time to ensuring the platform and mobile app meet customer expectations. Cynergy Bank built the core engagement layer of its mobile app using Flutter, the open-source framework by Google Cloud for building multi-platform applications from a single code base. This allows the bank to build one code base and then deploy it across different channels, rather than having to build one for each. Likewise, if the team needs to make any changes to the system, it can simply make these changes once and deploy them across all channels.

Working in Google Cloud has also enabled the Cynergy Bank team to use one-click deployments as they build, including automated self-repairs, increasing its deployment speed and freeing up engineers to focus their time on essential tasks to enhance the customer experience.

Similarly, managed services such as AlloyDB and GKE from Google Cloud mean Cynergy Bank does not need additional dedicated resources to maintain large on-premise systems, allowing it to focus instead on meeting customer expectations.

Overall the platform architecture built for digital channels leveraging Google Cloud's capabilities has allowed the bank to build and test potentially 2-3 times faster and at a lower cost point.

With its data still in silos across the organization, Cynergy Bank is now in the process of feeding all its data sources into AlloyDB, creating a single source of truth for its operational use cases. At the same time, it’s improving its data governance to document the lineage and purpose of its data. The ultimate goal is to enable individual departments to access and use the data autonomously for their own needs, facilitating more data-driven decisions across the business.

One example of this is the improved fraud-detection process the bank is building into its mobile app payments. By giving its fraud team access to a more integrated data ecosystem providing better-structured data, Cynergy Bank is enabling it to make better decisions about fraudulent activity and return fewer false positives. This helps to prevent fraud while ensuring more legitimate payments are processed, further improving the customer experience.