The Hackett Group Director Jay Ruffin Senior talks with Oracle Cloud CTO Yonas Yohannes and Oracle Vice President, Cloud Engineering Venu Mantha about how banks are accelerating their movement towards cloud-based digital solutions as a key element of their overall digital transformation efforts. Part 2.Show NotesWelcome to the Hackett Group’s Business Excelleration Podcast, where - week after week - we hear from experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours, and celebrate milestones on the journey to world-class performance. This episode of the podcast is hosted by Hackett Group Director Jay Ruffin and features guests Yonas Yohannes, Oracle Cloud CTO, and Venu Mantha, Oracle's Vice President of Cloud Engineering.  The Hackett Group and Oracle have partnered to create a series on emerging needs for the financial services industry, especially focusing on cloud platform and financial services solutions.  Today's episode is the second in the series; following on the last episode, it focuses on how banks are accelerating their movement toward cloud-based digital solutions as a key element of their overall digital transformation efforts.As the conversation gets underway, Jay asks his guests how they expect banks will continue to meet customer expectations in a changing market.  The COVID-19 pandemic caused an acceleration in digital transformation in the banking space, with customers rapidly adopting and expecting technological services.  Traditional banks have been faced with the need to speed up their own shifts to digital platforms and offerings, and have found themselves in competition not only with other banks, but with big tech and financial tech.  They must both adapt to address a changing customer profile and mount a two-pronged attack against the pressures of big tech and fin-tech.  This attack involves forming alliances with fin-tech to together work against big tech.Banks must also attend to matters of threat mitigation and efficiency, and this entails a new mindset.  Part of this overall mindset requires the need to think differently about how to interact with customers.  Customers are the primary asset of a bank, and banks need to be considering the entire life cycle of the customer and adopt a customer-centric model.  The new bank mindset must also be marked by agility, risk management, flexibility, and innovation.  Agile banks are best able to meet evolving demands and are marked by the kind of holistic thinking that is necessary to developing solutions for a changing market and consumer base. Moving forward, Yonas and Venu comment on how cloud providers are adapting alongside banks.  Cloud providers like Oracle are specifically working on fit-for-purpose solutions for banks, following several general steps in doing so.  They are helping banks with the challenging process of first simplifying legacy technology and then migrating aggressively in order to take advantage of the new digital environment.  Oracle is offering what Yonas calls automation plus, and the company has developed a robust two-part strategy of helping banking partners.  The conversation concludes with thoughts on current statistics reflecting the banking space.