Celebrating its 10^th year, AWS re:Invent 2021 is gearing up to deliver a week of inspiring content, educational workshops and bootcamps, and plenty of peer-to-peer networking opportunities. This year’s conference will take place in Las Vegas from November 29^th through December 3rd, and will have an engaging virtual component for those who cannot join us in person.

AWS re:Invent 2021 will offer hundreds of sessions, with more than 60 focused on the financial services industry. You’ll learn how AWS experts and breakthrough leaders across banking, payments, insurance, and capital markets are using cloud technology to transform their businesses and innovate on behalf of their customers. If you are in the financial services industry and are looking to participate in re:Invent 2021, be sure to do the following:

• Visit the re:Invent website for everything you need to know about re:Invent
• Register for re:Invent to attend in person or virtually
• Review the Financial Services Attendee Guide for comprehensive information on the financial services sessions, workshops, resources, and networking events to help you plan your agenda. A recommended Financial Services Daily Schedule can be also be accessed here
• When you are in Las Vegas, drop by the Financial Services Industry lounge on Level 4 of the Venetian Conference Center to network with your peers and meet AWS technical and industry experts

Financial Services breakout sessions

AWS re:Invent breakout sessions are lecture-style and one hour long. These sessions take place across the re:Invent campus and cover topics at all levels. For our virtual attendees, breakout sessions will be available on-demand.

Following is a sampling of breakout sessions featuring AWS financial services customers. A complete list of content relevant to financial services, including additional sessions from AWS partners and customers as well deep dives and chalk talks on a range of topics – data lakes, quantum computing, serverless architecture, blockchain applications, and much more – can be found in the Financial Services Attendee Guide.

FSI202: How JPMorgan Chase modernized its core risk management platform

JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) Corporate Investment Bank’s Athena platform provides technologists, quantitative analysts, and risk managers with a consistent, cross-asset portfolio of models, frameworks, and tools to use in building financial applications. Having migrated a number of trade desks to AWS and achieved improved performance, the platform owner decided to accelerate Athena’s journey to the cloud. This session will share the challenges that JPMC overcame and detail the Athena team’s adoption of cloud-native services, including Amazon EKS, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, to enable customers to evaluate risk across a broader set of market conditions and scenarios.

Featured speakers are Michael Elliott, Managing Director, CIB, JPMorgan Chase & Co.; Ioana Nistoreanu, Lead Software Developer, JPMorgan Chase & Co.; Oli Leach, Global Accounts Solutions Architect, AWS.

FSI203: State Farm: Enabling rapid deployment with risk automation

Learn how State Farm streamlined deployment approval from months to minutes by implementing an automated, data-driven risk management process for all use cases leveraging AWS services. Approving deployments to production in Financial Services is often a manual, opinion-based, and time-consuming process that frustrates developers, security teams, and executive leadership alike. This solution not only notifies account administrators of potential compliance issues, but it also supports auto-remediation of these issues and provides continuous, real-time testing and monitoring of controls, which accelerates service adoption for developers, delivers assurance to InfoSec professionals, and enables agile executive decision making.

Featured speakers are Dennis Kampen, Architect Manager – Public Cloud Adoption Team, State Farm; Jeff Michels, Software Developer, State Farm; John Lucking, Principal Solutions Architect, Insurance, AWS.

FSI204: Goldman Sachs: Reinventing financial data analytics

Performing sophisticated data management and analytics can create a critical advantage in financial markets, but doing so with speed and scale requires significant time and resources. Learn how Goldman Sachs addressed this challenge by building a cloud-native, modular, and integrated collection of services to enable innovation in financial data analytics. Hear how the bank re-architected its proprietary data and analytics capabilities leveraging AWS services to make it easier to discover, combine, and analyze data in minutes. This session will share how capital markets organizations can adopt this solution through the Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud to accelerate data integration and quantitative analysis.

Featured speakers are Andy Phillips, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs; Francis Giannaros, Vice President, Goldman Sachs; Balaji Gopalan, Principal Solutions Architect, AWS.

FSI207: Itaú: Upgrading platforms to transform customer experience

Itaú Unibanco, Latin America’s largest bank, is systematically modernizing its legacy applications, moving from mainframe to open platform, to better serve its 56 million retail customers. For instance, the bank is migrating its transaction-account front end to improve performance and enhancing its account statement application using Amazon OpenSearch, delivering features such as textual search for transactions up to 22 years old. Attendees will learn how the bank organized to accelerate innovation and adoption of services such as AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB, which it used to deploy an instant payment system, Pix, that handles nine million transactions daily.

Featured speakers are Fabio Napoli, Director of Technology, Itaú Unibanco; Wilson Cristoni, Head of Digital Integration, Itaú Unibanco; Julio Morais, Enterprise Sales Executive, AWS.

FSI301: Standard Chartered Bank: Migrating core banking to AWS

Standard Chartered Bank (SCB), a global bank serving customers in 60 markets, is launching a cloud-first strategy. One of SCB’s lighthouse projects is the migration of its core banking system, Atlas, to AWS. As a tier 1, highly regulated workload, Atlas requires exceptional levels of security, availability, and auditability. This session shares how SCB migrated Atlas to AWS, lessons that the company learned, and the benefits of this migration, including enhanced reliability and performance. In particular, learn how SCB moved from Db2 to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, which has advanced compliance and resilience features that were critical to the successful migration.

Featured speakers are Mitra Heravizadeh, Managing Director, Technology & Innovation, Standard Chartered Bank; Xavier Loup, Principal Solutions Architect, Financial Services, AWS.

FSI305: Citi: Scaling security guardrail development via AWS CDK

Citi has harnessed AWS CDK to unify software development processes across its AWS environment, using years of experience with infrastructure as code. Still, maintaining templates, writing custom scripts, or learning domain-specific languages can be challenging. In this session, learn how Citi uses AWS CDK to evolve testing, distribute modular infrastructure components across teams, and implement pipelines with high-level programming languages. Discover how this innovative approach has allowed Citi to scale design, engineering, and deployment of preventative, detective, and responsive controls to securely migrate workloads to AWS.

Featured speakers are Michael Neil, Senior Vice President, Cloud DevSecOps Lead, Citi; Richard Julian, Senior Vice President, Cloud DevSecOps Lead, Citi; Freddy Kasprzykowski, Security Transform Consultant, Financial Services, AWS.

FSI306: CME Group: Enabling data science through event-based design

As one of the world’s largest futures exchanges, CME Group faces ever-growing data needs. Through company acquisitions, vendor partnerships, and expanded integrations with external data platforms like Salesforce, CME needed to transform its data management capabilities. In this session, find out how CME built a scalable data-ingestion pipeline using an event-driven, file-based architecture. This versatile solution, which uses AWS Step Functions, Amazon AppFlow, AWS Lambda, Amazon EMR, and AWS Lake Formation, supports compliance data management, commercial data enablement, real-time Kafka publishing, and data-lake optimization. Critically, it enables the company’s data science community by making it easier to securely integrate and analyze third-party datasets.

Featured speakers are Rick Fath, Senior Director of Cloud Architecture, CME Group; Keerti Shah, Global Account Solution Architecture, AWS.

FSI307: Vanguard: Personalization at scale with Amazon SageMaker

Vanguard is using machine learning (ML) on AWS to solve one of the most pressing challenges in financial advice: personalization. In this session, learn how Vanguard’s ML engine uses AWS services such as Amazon SageMaker to optimize rule-of-thumb recommendations with more sophisticated financial advice to maximize retirement wealth and spending for investors. Vanguard will share how training the ML models on large Amazon SageMaker instances, including more than 120 instances for data generation, made the unsolvable solvable, accelerating project completion time to less than one month and lowering the cost from $5 million to less than $200 thousand.

Featured speakers are Ayoub Hazrati, Data Scientist, Vanguard; John Formento, Solutions Architect, AWS.

FSI308: Globe Life: Accelerate innovation with self-serve analytics

Learn how Globe Life went from running queries one model at a time to analyzing more than 10 billion records and 20 models simultaneously, deriving business insights in under 30 seconds. Globe Life’s self-service analytics framework leverages data from multiple sources using AWS services, including Amazon Redshift. In this session, Globe Life shares how its analytics environment maintains security guardrails to empower its actuarial and business teams to meet time-sensitive regulatory requirements and quickly perform deep analysis for business innovation.

Featured speakers are Arthur Heezen, Director, Data Strategy, Globe Life; Dileep Kumar, Senior Manager, Data Engineering and Cloud Data Platforms, Globe Life; Srikanth Sopirala, Principal Analytics Solutions Architect, AWS.

FSI309: Discover Financial Services: Payments mainframe to cloud platform

Discover Financial Services, a leading digital bank and payments company, transformed its payments business on AWS to enhance card-settlement capabilities and adapt to global market conditions while maintaining a highly secure network. In this session, Discover discusses the opportunity to improve its legacy system, the next-generation platform architecture on AWS, and the benefits of adopting pricing changes within 3 weeks (rather than 6 months). This session shares lessons learned from migrating from a batch-oriented mainframe to an internet-scale, PCI-compliant and resilient platform powered by Amazon EMR, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon RDS. The result: Discover now processes 4 million transaction records in 9 minutes.

Featured speakers are Ewen McPherson, Director – Payment Services BT Application Development, Discover Financial Services; Don Drake, Senior US-Central Analytics Solutions Architect, AWS.

FSI310: Fannie Mae: Migrating at scale without lifting and shifting

Since 2019, Fannie Mae has been executing large-scale application migrations to AWS to improve operational resilience, scalability, and security, all while reducing total cost of ownership, increasing developer productivity, and driving machine learning adoption across the enterprise. In this session, learn about Fannie Mae’s strategy—avoiding lifting and shifting in favor of refactoring and replatforming application components using an AWS multi-account strategy that features modular virtual private cloud design and streamlined network connectivity. Use cases include replatforming OLTP databases to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with AWS DMS and rearchitecting applications using microservices patterns with AWS Fargate.

Featured speakers are Ramon Richards, Chief Information Officer, Fannie Mae; Satya Addagarla, Vice President, Singlefamily Technology Management, Fannie Mae; Harsha Nippani, Principal Solutions Architect, AWS.

FSI205-S: Building Farmers’ infrastructure as code and landing zones on AWS (sponsored by Capgemini)

In this session, discover how designing and creating infrastructure as code and landing zones help automate the setup of secure and scalable multi-account AWS environments. Also, learn how you can implement Terraform to onboard several applications onto landing zones with increased speed and code reusability. This presentation is brought to you by Capgemini, an AWS Partner.

FSI206-S: How TFS uses Snowflake and AWS to drive mobility financing (sponsored by Snowflake)

Helping millions of people get mobile while driving the vehicle of their dreams has been at the core of the Toyota Financial Services (TFS) mission. In this session, learn how TFS uses AWS and Snowflake for its data platform to provide capital financing at record speed for its customers and partners, like Mazda. Also, discover how TFS completely digitized the customer experience during the pandemic so that customers and partners could have easy access to the relevant data and services. This presentation is brought to you by Snowflake, an AWS Partner.

COP212-S: How Capital One continues to change banking for good at scale (sponsored by Capital One)

It’s one thing to move to the cloud, but it’s another to operate there at scale. Capital One was the first US bank to migrate out of data centers and move fully to the cloud. Today, Capital One is operating in a highly regulated industry at scale on AWS, focusing on cloud governance and resiliency, culture, and education to deliver intelligent solutions that benefit millions of customers. In this session, Capital One shares some important lessons they learned on this journey and discusses how they are using real-time data to develop some of their flagship applications and operating them at scale. This presentation is brought to you by Capital One.

COP216-S: Guardian’s digital transformation with AWS and Accenture (sponsored by Accenture)

This session details the cloud transformation at Guardian Life, a leader in individual life insurance. Learn about Guardian’s aggressive business goals—such as improving time to market, reducing cost, and improving customer engagement—and how a solution powered by AWS and Accenture helped the company achieve high levels of agility and scalability. The session covers Guardian’s implementation of the Accenture Life Insurance & Annuity Platform (ALIP), a new-age, cloud-native life insurance policy administration platform that provides the required functional and technical capabilities to streamline Guardian’s processes and operations and deliver on their business goals. This presentation is brought to you by Accenture, an AWS Partner.

AWS Gameday for Financial Services

On Tuesday, November 30^th (7:45 AM – 12:15 PM) and Thursday, December 2^nd (1:45 PM to 6:15 PM), AWS will host GameDay for Financial Services, sponsored by Refinitiv and Gremlin.

GMD202: AWS GameDay—Financial Services

The AWS Financial Services GameDay is a hands-on learning experience designed to familiarize customers with AWS and deepen their cloud skills through real-world simulation. The event provides Financial Services technology professionals the opportunity to learn how to apply AWS services to achieve specific business outcomes in an engaging environment.

Participants will develop modules required to manage a sustainable investment portfolio, including: integrating real-time financial market prices and ESG scores from LSEG/Refinitiv, testing workload resiliency and protecting against service disruptions using Gremlin, building financial analytics for portfolio modeling using Amazon FinSpace, and using machine learning for price prediction and news sentiment analysis.

We look forward to seeing you at re:Invent 2021!