Cloud spending has become a pressing issue for financial institutions as it has moved from a transformation enabler to a material operating cost, driven by factors such as multicloud complexity, rapid experimentation, and inconsistent governance. High cloud costs can materially affect a financial institution’s ability to invest, operate efficiently, and compete, potentially eroding funding for innovation and creating tension between finance and engineering teams. James Stevenson, client partner and cloud and technology strategy global practice and offering leader at IBM Consulting, discussed with BizTech how applying a FinOps approach to financial institutions’ cloud management strategy can help reduce costs and create architectural efficiencies, positioning organizations to optimize cloud usage in an AI world.