As the financial services industry accelerates its major digital transformation, public cloud has reached massive scale for a variety of use cases, including generative and agentic AI. Today, cloud is the preferred primary deployment model, changing both business-critical and frontend operations to enable a more customer-focused and digitally engaged organization. Today’s financial services organizations are no longer hesitant to move mission-critical workloads to the public cloud. This report outlines the drivers, challenges, and approaches that financial services institutions are taking to the cloud.