The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) wants to migrate to the cloud – and is looking for help on three fronts to do so, it announced today, including support decommissioning its existing data centre.
The authority is the conduct regulator for over 58,000 financial services firms and the financial markets sector in the UK, which in 2017 contributed an estimated £119b to the UK economy.
The FCA – which oversees a sector that employs over 2.2 million and which contributes £65.6 billion in tax to the UK economy annually – has scheduled a supplier event for November 16, it said.
In a “prior information notice” published on a European tenders page, it said: “The Financial Conduct Authority has identified an ongoing need for cloud and other technology and project delivery resources, to support a number of its technology programmes and projects, as well as its transition to the cloud in the coming years.”
FCA Cloud Plans: Three Lots
Dangling the prospect of a four-year contract, the FCA said it was dividing the contract into three lots.
These are:
1) “A Cloud and Technology Resourcing and Outcomes Framework”
2) “Cloud Design, Build and/or Run”
3) Project Management and Resourcing.
FCA Cloud: Needs to be UK-Based
Its cloud would need to be UK-based, with some flexibility, the FCA said: “The majority of services are intended to be delivered on site in London or off site in the UK. However, the FCA will allow certain specific services and outcomes to be delivered offshore.”
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It needs everything from a migration plan to application architecture design, application hosting architecture and an implementation plan under the framework agreement.
It also has a recurring requirement for cloud specialists like solution architects, cloud architects, security architects, cloud engineers, data architects, DevOps engineers, a “functional consultant” and more, the FCA said.
FCA Already Using Salesforce Cloud
A “customer success story” published by Salesforce shows that the FCA is already using its cloud for certain functions, including logging around 9,000 calls and subsequent cases per month from consumers in its “Service Cloud.”
It also augments existing intelligence with social media information captured by Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, the company said.
Gareth Lewis, Chief Information Officer at the FCA, told Salesforce: “With Radian6 [a social media monitoring platform], we can interrogate massive volumes of unstructured data to provide greater insight into issues in the industry.”
Today’s announcement comes as the FCA must ensure these 58,000 financial services companies remain in strict compliance with a growing host of regulatory requirements that sprung up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
Potential applicants need to complete a Registration Questionnaire on the eSourcing portal, Bravo, no later than the Thursday November 8, 2018 at 14:00 GMT.
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