Case Study: Capital One Bank using AWS
About Capital One Bank
Capital One Financial Corporation is an American bank holding company specializing in credit cards, auto loans, banking, and savings accounts, headquartered in McLean, Virginia with operations primarily in the United States.
To Cloud or Not to Cloud?
Cloud computing, a mature technology now in its second decade, has a clear track record of helping businesses of all types and sizes maximize speed and agility, shift valuable resources away from IT operations, and sharpen their focus on innovating and building new customer value. As a result, it’s getting easier and easier for many businesses that aren’t currently in the cloud to decide to start heading there.
Many businesses — but not all.
“Larger enterprises are always going to have a certain amount of resistance to such a big change,” says George Brady, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Capital One. “That’s especially true at financial institutions, where legacy core systems, complex operating rules, and extensive compliance requirements can make people reluctant to move to the cloud.
So how did Capital One get to the point where, in 2015, it announced that all new company applications would run in — and all existing applications would be systematically rearchitected for — the cloud? Although Capital One, a technology company that offers financial services, is different in important ways from other companies in its industry, its path to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and its cloud-first approach to software development offers useful tips for large, non-cloud-native, highly-regulated enterprises mapping out their own cloud journeys.
Opportunity | Building a Cloud-First Organization
Once Capital One had set its sights on the cloud, it began the long-term planning for how to exit its on-premises data centers and reimagine itself as a technology company with a completely new approach to talent management, technology development, and operations. “We didn’t start on day one knowing exactly how this would all unfold over many years,” Nims says. “We knew that we were embarking on a massive transformation. Success required that we have, first, a vision of where we were going; second, the courage to make a bold move; and third, the tenacity and perseverance to make it through.”
Solution | Accelerating Innovation
By migrating to the cloud and changing its technology operations, Capital One has been able to scale to meet demand and move faster in a variety of ways. First, on AWS, Capital One can provision infrastructure almost instantly at a virtually unlimited scale, using as much or as little computing and storage as its applications need — and paying only for what it uses. The company has also seen an increase in its pace of innovation, going from quarterly and monthly application updates to releasing new code multiple times per day. Moreover, Capital One has reduced the average time needed to build a development environment from 3 months to only minutes.
Outcome | Building the Bank of the Future
Capital One’s digital transformation began with the ambition to become a modern technology company that could develop its own applications and lead the banking industry in innovating for customers. Along the way, though, the company completely reinvented itself — its talent, culture, operations, and technology infrastructure. As a result, its cloud migration became a foundation for building the bank of the future, one that could quickly and continuously innovate to meet changing customer needs and preferences.
“Capital One today is an entirely different company from what it was 8 years ago,” says Nims. “We can now build new experiences that are powered by more data and available in real time with algorithms and artificial intelligence.”
Moreover, Capital One has proven that a Fortune 100 company in a highly regulated industry can make the leap from legacy, on-premises data centers to modern architectures in the cloud. The key to doing so, for Capital One, was approaching the move holistically. It not only went all in on migrating to AWS — it also reimagined its entire organization, hiring and developing a diverse group of data scientists, developers, and experts in human-centered design who could work together to transform Capital One into a pioneering technology company.
