BIZTECH: Where do you most often see waste or overspending in financial institutions’ cloud environments?
STEVENSON: In financial services, many of the early and obvious cloud inefficiencies have already been addressed, particularly by firms that were early adopters. Today, we most often see overspending in newer or less-governed areas of consumption.
One common area is AI and advanced analytics, where many firms are still in experimentation mode and governance has not fully caught up with usage. Another is legacy applications that were migrated to cloud without being fully redesigned for cloud-native architectures, which often leads to overprovisioning or inefficient use of services. We also commonly see waste in storage tiering, idle or underutilized resources, inconsistent tagging, and fragmented purchasing or reservation strategies across business units.
The pattern is less about a lack of cloud adoption and more about the need for more mature governance, architecture discipline and accountability at scale.
BIZTECH: What is FinOps and what does it entail?
STEVENSON: FinOps is a cloud financial management discipline that helps organizations maximize the business value of cloud by bringing together finance, technology and business teams to make better, data-driven decisions. It is both an operating model and a cultural practice focused on improving visibility, accountability, forecasting, optimization and governance across cloud consumption.
Importantly, FinOps is not simply about reducing spend. It is about helping organizations make intentional trade-offs between cost, speed and performance so they can invest more effectively and scale cloud responsibly.
At IBM, we increasingly see FinOps working alongside technology business management, or TBM. TBM complements FinOps by extending the conversation beyond cloud cost into broader technology cost, value and business alignment. Together, FinOps and TBM help organizations understand not only what cloud costs but what value it delivers in the context of products, services and customer journeys — for example, mortgage servicing, payments processing or ATM transactions. That combination gives financial institutions a stronger foundation for investment planning and value realization.
LEARN MORE: How do CDW and IBM elevate IT finance management beyond the balance sheet?
BIZTECH: How can FinOps help financial services organizations bring down cloud costs?
STEVENSON: FinOps helps financial services organizations reduce cloud costs by creating transparency, accountability and consistency across complex cloud environments. In large financial institutions, different business units often have different consumption patterns, priorities and technology stacks. A mature FinOps model establishes common governance, standard metrics and shared workflows so those teams can operate with a consistent view of cloud usage and value.
That consistency enables better benchmarking across business units, more accurate forecasting and faster identification of inefficiencies. It also helps firms shift from reactive cost management to proactive cost engineering. For example, leading institutions are embedding cost policies directly into engineering workflows — guiding teams toward appropriate service choices, storage tiers and architectural patterns before spending occurs. This FinOps as Code approach helps reduce waste at the source rather than after the fact.
For financial services institutions, that means lower cloud waste, stronger financial discipline, and better alignment between cloud investments and business priorities.
BIZTECH: How should financial institutions approach the creation of a FinOps strategy that will serve them now and in the future?
STEVENSON: Financial institutions should approach FinOps strategically, not just as a tooling initiative. The most effective FinOps strategies are built on four foundations: data and tooling, governance, operating model and cross-functional accountability.
Tooling is essential, but tools alone do not create outcomes. Firms also need clear processes, decision rights, policies and roles that define how cloud spending is governed and optimized. Just as important, FinOps must be supported jointly by finance, technology, engineering and business leadership. It is not a siloed capability; it requires enterprisewide sponsorship and participation.
Future-ready firms are also moving upstream. Rather than looking for savings only after cloud resources are deployed, they are embedding value engineering principles earlier in the lifecycle — during architecture, design and provisioning. That shift helps ensure cost, performance, resilience and compliance considerations are addressed together from the outset.
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