9 Moving to the Next Phase of Cloud Adoption A number of business cases exist to convince internal stakeholders to move beyond a tactical approach to cloud adoption. 01 Embracing cloud partnerships to help foster and retain talent. Capital markets firms have been struggling to attract and retain top technology talent over the last few years3. One investment bank respondent notes that the firm’s IT department staff comprises individuals with more of a background in legacy technology support than next-gen tech development; this firm’s C-suite is keen to ensure there is more diversity in the future to mitigate key-person risk. The volatility of the markets, the backlash after the banking crisis that left banking jobs looking significantly less appealing for the younger generation, and the highly competitive environment for technology jobs across sectors have resulted in a dearth of talent in the pipeline. And even once a financial institution manages to attract tech talent, retaining that talent may be difficult. The next generation of graduates has different working environment expectations, such as more open collaboration across organizations in business and technology development. The shine of employment with a capital markets firm can quickly wear off for recent graduates once they confront the reality of working in an environment where legacy technology and data silos lurk around every corner, and where corporate policies prohibit the use of many open-source tools developers rely on. 02 Focusing tech talent on solving core business problems. The majority of capital markets participants recognize technology is not their core business. But the effort required to support in-house software builds hampers their ability to grow, and the resources required to keep pace with technology increase daily. Further, support for internal builds and heavily customized vendor technology often relies on IT staff that have deep understanding of the system architecture and technology environment; hence, key-person risk is high. 3Aite Group, Top 10 Trends in Institutional Securities & Investments, 2019.