The financial services industry is evolving at pace; driven by new digital-first experiences that are personalized, always-on, and laser focused on customer experience. In order to remain competitive in such an environment, businesses, whether they are incumbents, fintechs, credit unions or insurers, must develop and implement a robust and forward-looking digital transformation strategy.

But not all transformations are not created equal.

Focused exclusively on financial services, Extractable, a Silicon Valley-based digital consultancy, takes a unique approach to digital transformation. Following the Design Thinking model coined and championed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school), Extractable tackles transformation from the ground up — with the user. The group works closely with clients in banking, investment management and insurance to deeply understand their customer’s unique needs. They leverage primary customer and market research in tandem with quantitative data analysis to define the actual usage and performance of digital systems. Additionally, they work closely with management teams to align departmental business goals to a digital strategy, placing equal emphasis on cultural transformation.

“Our work is really around applying our proprietary research, knowledge and experience to ensure that those companies we work with get the most out of their digital channels,” notes Craig McLaughlin, Extractable’s CEO. “For us, customer experience and user centricity are in our DNA, having served clients in Silicon Valley for over 20 years. We seek to extend that expertise, looking to bring together first-person user research in terms of who the company’s customers are, and marry that squarely to the overarching business goals and, holistically, what each department is looking to achieve. Finally, we bring that together in the form of a cohesive digital strategy,” McLaughlin explains.

“A lot of the time, what ‘digital’ is trying to do is not necessarily the same as what the organization is looking to do more broadly,” he continues. “So, we typically spend a lot of time with CEOs and others in the business to understand what the traditional strategy looks like, and then develop ways in which we can manifest that into the digital realm. It’s about bringing all the disparate teams and departments together under one strategy that is absolutely cohesive and unified, and laser-focused on a single goal — This is particularly true for financial institutions such as credit unions.”

The need for such a strategy, says McLaughlin, is being driven by the broader trend in the sector that sees customers shift from using brick-and-mortar financial services, such as bank branches, to their digital counterparts. This has been accelerated by the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic, he explains. “People have been shifting away from visiting branches for some time, but we’re now seeing that they just can’t do that even if they want to. So, for companies in the industry, whatever their learning curve was around switching to a digital-first strategy, that’s being pushed and accelerated. A lot of us, as a result of COVID, will adapt to and adopt the digital world, and that really changes things for these organizations.

“With that in mind, I couldn’t imagine being a CEO of a bank today and saying, ‘our strategy hinges on the building of branches’,” says McLaughlin. “Really, they should blend the digital and physical and deeply consider how that combination enables them to stand for something special. The big question to answer is, how can an incumbent FSI manifest their unique brand story into a set of digital and physical experiences that can be delivered in concert — at scale.”

Extractable’s customers include many of the largest credit unions in the United States. Extractable is currently working with Visions Federal Credit Union, a New York-based CU that offers a host of services such as savings, checking, loans, mortgages and investments, and online banking. Visions FCU is also working with Extractable to launch a member-focused digital transformation. “It’s a fantastic credit union with a very clear vision in terms of growth,” says McLaughlin. “One of the great things about the company is its culture and leadership, which is the single most critical success factor when you’re driving change.

“Where we come into that work is carrying out research into the organization’s members and prospective members, with a view towards developing a user-centered digital strategy,” he adds. “Every credit union we work with has something unique, and Visions has a great opportunity for growth. We’re particularly impressed with the organization’s ability to prioritize and focus on collaboration and using data insights to guide decision making.”

The transformation at Visions is still in its early stages, with Extractable focused on the discovery and research work that informs the digital strategy. This, shares McLaughlin, includes developing an understanding of each department’s goals, and the specific areas of focus for growth that can be improved with digital.

“It’s really all about establishing a plan for how the client can delight the existing member and win the prospective member — digitally,” he says. “With that roadmap in place and alignment with the credit union leadership team, the focus shifts to how those goals can be achieved through the digital experience.”

Why FinTechs Are Moving to the Cloud

Financial technology companies operate in a fast-moving, highly competitive space where speed, security, and cost-efficiency are critical. Cloud computing has become a foundational enabler for FinTech firms, offering four key advantages over traditional on-premises IT: scalability, reduced IT costs, business continuity, and accelerated technology adoption.

According to DadeSystems CIO Mike Capote, the flexibility and agility that the cloud model provides versus a traditional IT model is not just advantageous — it is “necessary in today’s market.”

Cost Reduction: Eliminating the On-Premises Overhead

Companies that do not use cloud infrastructure are typically self-hosting their technology stack. This traditional model introduces significant overhead at every stage of the IT lifecycle:

• Procurement cycles: Acquiring new servers requires lengthy purchasing and approval processes before any configuration can begin.
• Hardware costs: Physical servers, storage arrays, and networking equipment require upfront capital expenditure.
• Staffing: Specialist IT staff are needed to configure, maintain, and support on-premises infrastructure.
• Facilities: Dedicated data center space, cooling, and power all add to ongoing operating expenses.
• Upgrade cycles: Moving to newer software or hardware versions requires additional procurement and effort.

With cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS), a FinTech company can subscribe to a new service, evaluate it quickly, and scale or cancel it without hardware investment. There is no need to budget separately for system upgrades, expert on-site staff, energy costs, or physical data center space.

Scalability: Pay for What You Actually Use

Storage and compute provisioning under a traditional model was inherently inefficient. IT teams would monitor disk capacity, run cleanup operations when drives filled up, and then procure additional hardware — typically purchasing more than they immediately needed (often estimated at around 20% extra) as a buffer for anticipated growth.

Cloud infrastructure eliminates this cycle entirely. Compute power, memory, and storage can all be provisioned on demand and billed based on actual consumption. DadeSystems, according to Capote, leverages this scalability on a daily basis — spinning resources up or down as workloads require, without locking capital into idle hardware.

Business Continuity: Distributed Resilience by Default

Disaster recovery under the traditional model was operationally complex. A typical recovery scenario involved physically transporting backup tapes to a secondary location, flying IT staff to that site, and manually restoring operations — a process that could take hours or days and introduced significant risk of data loss.

Cloud platforms address this by design. Primary data, compute power, memory, and customer data can be replicated across geographically distributed regions. In the event of a regional outage or disaster, failover can occur automatically or with minimal manual intervention. For a FinTech company handling payment data or financial records, this level of resilience is not optional — it is a regulatory and operational requirement in most jurisdictions.

Technology Innovation: Experiment Without the Friction

One of the most underappreciated benefits of cloud platforms for FinTech is the reduction in the cost and time of experimentation. Under a traditional IT model, evaluating a new technology — even on a 30-day trial — required procuring a physical server, configuring it, installing and setting up software, and running tests before any meaningful evaluation could begin.

Cloud marketplaces from providers like Azure and AWS integrate hundreds of pre-built services and partner technologies directly into their platforms. Firms can enable and test new services with a few clicks, often without writing a single line of infrastructure code. This dramatically compresses the evaluation cycle and lowers the barrier to adopting new technologies.

DadeSystems demonstrated this in practice by evaluating and subsequently adopting Kubernetes through Microsoft Azure. What might have taken weeks of hardware setup and configuration in a traditional model became a point-and-click test that could be iterated on quickly before committing to full deployment.

Key Takeaways for FinTech Engineering Teams

• Scalability is operational, not just architectural: Cloud-native FinTech teams build workflows that scale compute and storage in response to real-time demand, avoiding both under-provisioning and waste.
• Cost modelling shifts from CapEx to OpEx: Cloud eliminates large upfront hardware investments in favour of predictable, usage-based operating costs — a significant advantage for growing FinTech startups managing burn rate.
• Business continuity is a baseline expectation: Multi-region replication and automated failover capabilities on major cloud platforms meet the availability and data durability requirements typical of financial services regulation.
• Cloud marketplaces accelerate the build vs. buy decision: Pre-integrated services for AI, machine learning, compliance tooling, and container orchestration allow FinTech engineers to evaluate and adopt technologies without deep infrastructure investment.
• Kubernetes and containers are well-supported: Managed Kubernetes services (such as Azure Kubernetes Service and Amazon EKS) lower the operational burden of running containerised workloads, making container adoption practical even for smaller FinTech engineering teams.

For FinTech companies operating under pressure to deliver new features, meet compliance requirements, and manage costs simultaneously, cloud computing has shifted from a strategic option to a practical necessity. The combination of flexible pricing, built-in resilience, and rapid access to new services gives cloud-native FinTechs a compounding advantage over competitors still running on-premises infrastructure.