infrastructure due to their scale. Poor infrastructure leads to non-competitiveness to
compete with foreign or overseas financial institutions. Coupled with the environmental
factors such as the financial turmoil since 2008 and the slowdown of local economy, it
resulted in a vicious cycle for business development.
However, on the other hand, the aforementioned "cloud computing" concept appeared in a
timely manner. It represented a revolutionary breakthrough of offering the information
services. Several factors prompted the leading visionary FMP to start considering leveraging
its own integrated cloud platform, via sharing of resources, to help the small and medium
enterprises to enhance their competiveness. In the same time, this will allow the visionary
FMP to plan the transformation of its own business model, from a passive match-maker role
to provide its own valuable trading information, allowing the market to establish a more
accurate transaction modeling, algorithms estimate, and risk assessment, to active the
development of the overall market. When the CEO of the FMP considered building the cloud
computing services platform, the company may play several different roles and have
corresponding measures. The final choice was to play the role of “cloud service providers” to
promote financial cloud ecosystem, and to define several success factors which became the
basis for the company to follow during this process. Initially, this FMP started by fulfilling the
needs of a shared cloud service platform to support the previously mentioned business
model, assessing how to reduce the security concerns on public clouds by its peers, and
considering the feasibility of establishing a private “community cloud”. However, in
planning the financial for the brand new business model, it was hard to estimate if sufficient
scale was there to balance the challenges of investment and loss. Furthermore, how to
achieve reasonable efficiency, security and service level for multi-tenants from technology
perspective? Additional difficulties in the decision-making process included the measures
necessary to support the business development, settlement, the details of the back-office
services, and the integration difficulties of platform hardware and software technology.
However, in referencing the financial cloud development in the more advanced countries,
the FMP realized that the division of work in the cloud service market was becoming more
mature which presented a new planning perspective for the tactics for cloud strategy. After
multiple discussions with the cloud service consultant, he decided to engage from a
commanding height of the eco-system - playing the role as a cloud service provider. The
information and communication infrastructure part can be provided through the “exclusive
independent environment” by the public cloud operators, which could not only protect the
security and service level of the supply chain but could also lower the entry barrier to sign-up.
IaaS service provider can offer custom-tailored website access and software package to
support business activities, for example turnkey solutions for CRM, catalogue maintenance,
