Financial institutions continue to migrate their operations to the cloud. Now, “savvy businesses are embracing FinOps frameworks to elevate their fiscal prowess and drive long-term prosperity,” according to Forbes. However, a critical challenge has emerged as a result: managing cloud investments while achieving operational excellence. Financial Operations practices have become essential for investment companies, hedge funds, and asset managers, with this in mind.
FinOps is growing in its importance to financial firms as well. According to a report by CIO Dive, 93% of Fortune 100 companies now participate in FinOps Foundation programs. In this article, we explore how FinOps practices empower financial services firms. Firms can use the framework to gain visibility into cloud spending, allocate resources efficiently, and align IT costs with outcomes.
The Evolution of FinOps in Financial Services
Gartner describes FinOps as “[the application of] traditional DevOps concepts of agility, continuous integration and deployment, and end-user feedback to financial governance, budgeting, and cost optimization efforts.” Originally focused on public cloud spending, FinOps strategies can also incorporate SaaS, licensing, AI, and even traditional data centers.
The Financial Operations framework helps FIs monitor and manage these assets to optimize their use and enable proper governance. Tigran Khrimian, Chief Technology Engineering Officer at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), described one use case to CIO Magazine: “When you process big data, it gets really expensive really fast… We’ve built processes and automations for DevOps, operations, and dashboarding to determine what services have been underutilized and which ones had to be turned off.”
Why Financial Firms Need FinOps Now
Financial institutions have compelling reasons to adopt robust FinOps practices. Their challenges include:
- Managing the escalating costs of cloud investments: As firms deploy more services and data-intensive applications in the cloud, costs can quickly spiral without proper governance.
- Aligning tech investments with business outcomes: FinOps creates transparency that drives accountability, helping firms understand the business value generated from cloud investments.
- Controlling AI-related expenses: 63% of FinOps practitioners now manage AI costs across cloud and on-premises environments—up from 31% last year, CIO Dive reports. FinOps can help financial firms address unique cost challenges associated with AI.
- Enhancing operational efficiency: FinOps enables teams to make data-driven decisions about resource allocation, reducing waste while maintaining performance.
The Three Pillars of Effective FinOps
Fundamentally, the successful implementation of this framework revolves around three essential pillars. As The FinOps Foundation describes, “FinOps is performed by working iteratively on the Framework Capabilities through three phases: Inform, Optimize, and Operate,” where Framework Capabilities include methods under four domains: (1) Understand Usage & Cost, (2) Quantify Business Value, (3) Optimize Usage & Cost, and (4) Manage the FinOps Practice.
Inform: Creating Visibility and Accountability
The “Inform” pillar serves as the foundation for Business Intelligence functions in cloud cost management. According to one FinOps solution executive, “Informed decision-making is paramount for businesses navigating the intricacies of budgeting, forecasting and resource allocation,” Forbes reports.
For financial services firms, this means:
- Implementing robust analytics and reporting tools for real-time insights
- Creating transparency across departments on cloud usage and costs
- Establishing clear metrics that connect cloud spending to business outcomes
- Developing accurate forecasting models for cloud resource needs
As Jennifer Hays, SVP and Head of Engineering Excellence and Accessibility at Fidelity Investments, described to CIO Magazine: “To manage costs at scale, organizations must be able to react quickly, and FinOps practices should enable spend optimization decisions on a daily basis.”
Optimize: Maximizing Efficiency and Value
The “Optimize” pillar focuses on strategic resource allocation to maximize business value. Financial firms can implement several optimization strategies:
- Utilizing Reserved Instances (RI) pricing models for predictable workloads
- Implementing auto-scaling to match resources with actual demand
- Identifying and eliminating unused or underutilized resources
- Selecting appropriate instance types and storage options based on workload requirements
In their report on using FinOps to manage cloud costs, McKinsey Digital found that most organizations have untapped cost savings of 10%–20% in their cloud spending (where adopting an “everything as code” approach can help). Consequently, firms could repurpose the value from these savings for proactive innovation and growth initiatives.
Operate: Orchestrating Financial Workflows
The “Operate” pillar “breathes life into the FinOps framework, orchestrating financial workflows akin to business operations,” as Forbes describes. This involves:
- Implementing agile financial processes and automation
- Fostering collaboration across departments
- Creating responsive systems that adapt to market changes and regulatory demands
- Establishing governance frameworks that balance innovation with cost control
Adaptability is central to the operational elements of FinOps, enabling financial firms to be more agile in the face of market challenges and innovative to meet new client demands (e.g., with new financial products).
A Practical Approach to FinOps Implementation in Financial Services
In 2025, FinOps has become “ubiquitous across the enterprise landscape,” CIO Magazine describes, where “75% of Forbes’ Global 2000 companies [are] now all-in.” For financial institutions looking to establish or enhance their own FinOps practices, we recommend a phased approach to implementation.
Phase 1: Build the Foundation
Begin by establishing the core components of your FinOps practice:
- Make the business case: Beyond tools alone, focus on the entire FinOps practice, including personnel. “[Cloud cost management and optimization] will save your organization money, and quickly,” says Forrester. “However, without individuals to use the tool, communicate with finance, and convince engineers to take action, only a portion of these savings will be realized.”
- Assemble a cross-functional team: Create a hub-and-spoke model with a central FinOps team connecting to business units. This approach has proven effective at major financial institutions like Fidelity, where a centralized FinOps team works with business, technology, and other teams “to get the most value out of every dollar spent in the public cloud.”
- Implement foundational tools: Deploy cloud cost management solutions that provide visibility across multi-cloud environments.
- Establish baseline metrics: Document current spending patterns and set clear objectives for optimization.
Phase 2: Optimize and Automate
Once the foundation is in place, focus on optimization and automation:
- Develop policy frameworks: Create clear policies for resource provisioning, instance sizing, and other cost-critical decisions.
- Implement “FinOps as Code”: Integrate financial management principles directly into infrastructure provisioning pipelines. McKinsey Digital notes that this approach “reduces architectural debt… and strengthens the quality of the code. It also decreases the need for manual intervention by using code and automation to enforce cloud cost governance policies.”
- Establish showback/chargeback mechanisms: Implement systems that allocate costs to appropriate business units, increasing visibility on IT costs (showback) and billing departments on those costs (chargeback), creating accountability.
- Focus on AI and specialized workloads: Develop specific optimization strategies for data-intensive and AI workloads that are prevalent in financial services.
Phase 3: Mature and Expand
As your FinOps practice matures:
- Expand beyond cloud: Apply FinOps principles to SaaS, licensing, and on-premises infrastructure and spend management—the latter of which 65% of organizations are now doing, according to the FinOps Foundation’s State of FinOps 2025 Report.
- Implement advanced governance: Move from reactive to proactive governance with automated policies and guardrails.
- Leverage AI for operations: Explore Augmented Financial Operations, which “automates this process through the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) practices…to enable environments that automatically optimize cost based on defined business objectives expressed in natural language,” as Gartner describes.
- Continuously refine: Regularly review and adjust your FinOps practices as cloud technologies and business needs evolve.
Conclusion: FinOps as a Strategic Advantage
As cloud and SaaS become a larger part of IT spend, “near real-time insights and shared accountability become more important than how we traditionally used to manage tech investments,” as CIO Magazine describes. Effective FinOps is now a strategic imperative for financial firms as a result.
By implementing robust FinOps practices, financial institutions can:
- Gain visibility into cloud spending across complex environments
- Optimize resource allocation through data-driven decisions
- Align technology expenses with business outcomes
- Create governance frameworks that balance innovation with cost control
- Leverage automation to streamline Financial Operations
As the FinOps Foundation’s Steve Trask notes, “The longer you have done optimization, the more you realize you need governance and policy to further those efforts,” CIO Dive reports. Financial services firms that embrace this reality will be well-positioned to maximize the value of their cloud investments.
Option One Technologies: Your Partner in FinOps Excellence
Our team of experts combines deep financial services knowledge with cloud technology expertise to help investment companies, hedge funds, equity firms, and asset managers optimize their cloud investments. Contact us today to learn how we can help your organization implement a robust FinOps practice that drives business value while controlling costs.
