Not so long ago, the accepted financial services data management setup was an Oracle on-premises relational database. But modern cloud database providers offer secure and fast support across multiple document and multi-collection transactions, giving banks and other financial institutions no excuse for not making the move to cloud.

Many choose to “lift and shift” their data into the cloud. It seems a safe and practical decision, and for some companies it is. Others, however, find out the hard way that they have just shifted their problems with their data.

“When they move everything to the cloud and it was bad before, it will not be better in the cloud only because it’s in somebody else’s data center,” said Boris Bialek (pictured, left), global head of industry solutions at MongoDB Inc.

Bialek and Tony Coleman (pictured, right), chief technology officer of Temenos AG, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at MongoDB World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Temenos is disrupting the financial services industry and why combining AWS cloud-native managed services and MongoDB Atlas is their secret for super speedy transaction processing. (* Disclosure below.)

Lift and shift can be all pain and no gain

The financial services industry tends to be conservative when it comes to digital transformation. This is because it is highly regulated or, as Coleman puts it, “security, transactionality, atomicity; the whole shebang. Your worst possible nightmare is Monday morning for us.”

But although compliance and security are essential, caution is not the best policy if it means skipping infrastructure modernization.

“Although it might be counterintuitive, I think being ambitious and being bold is a better way through it,” he said. “Look at it holistically. Look at the end state, and then work out a practical way you can deliver value to the business and your customers.”

The Temenos banking platform is used by 41 of the top 50 banks in the world, with 1.2 billion people relying on Temenos software for their banking and financial needs, according to Coleman. The company recently ran a high-water benchmark test using AWS cloud-native management services and the MongoDB Atlas cloud database service. With 200 million accounts and 100 million customers, the test returned numbers of 102,875 transactions a second.

“Which is a phenomenal number,” Coleman said. “It meant that our throughput per core, which is a really good measure of efficiency, is up to four times better than we ran it three years ago.”

The difference is thanks to Temenos’ modernization efforts, including “application changes, architect changes, as well as using appropriate technology in the right place,” Coleman said.

The upshot is that Temenos is using 20% less infrastructure to give double the performance, resulting in cost savings and a major reduction in the company’s environmental footprint.

“Before this was a mainframe, and now it’s one little instance on AWS,” Bialek concluded.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MongoDB World event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the MongoDB World NYC event. Neither MongoDB Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE