re:Invent 2021: Top 5 Highlights and Recap for Financial Services

re:Invent 2021 celebrated its 10th year with a first-of-its-kind hybrid event, with over 20,000 in-person attendees and a virtual component for those who could not attend in person. For those able to make it to Las Vegas, there was plenty of excitement about being back at an in-person event and exploring the ways the cloud is helping companies innovate and grow in these unusual times.

In his re:Invent keynote, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said, “there’s no industry that hasn’t been touched by the cloud” and this is certainly true for the financial services sector.  There were over 50 sessions, live keynotes and presentations featuring AWS customers, across banking, capital markets, insurance, and payments, sharing their unique stories of transformation. Here are five of the top highlights:

• President and CEO of Nasdaq, Adena Friedman, announced that AWS will power Nasdaq’s first U.S. options market starting in 2022.
• Goldman Sachs announced the launch of Goldman Sachs Financial Cloud for Data, which combines Goldman’s investment data and analytics expertise with AWS’s cloud capabilities in a turnkey, managed service platform which reduces the time, expense, and resources required by institutional investors while building and operating data analytics systems.
• Kimberly Johnson, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Fannie Mae, described how Fannie Mae uses a suite of AWS solutions to manage risk effectively in the mortgage process.
• Shelly Swanback, president, product and platform at Western Union shared how the company is working alongside AWS and AWS Partners to transform and expand its business, including the launch of a new digital bank.
• Matt Coulter, technical architect at Liberty Mutual and winner of an AWS ‘Now Go Build’ award, described an internal developer solution powered by AWS that supports the rapid development of digital applications.

Additional sessions from customers like JPMorgan Chase, Vanguard, Itaú, Citigroup, Discover Financial and Standard Chartered covered a wide range of topics from core system migration to delivering personalization at scale through machine learning.

re:Invent attendees were also able to join dozens of hands-on learning sessions, including AWS Financial Services GameDay 2.0. This event was attended by several hundred customers and featured a trading simulation with real-time streaming market prices and ESG sustainability scores from LSEG-Refinitiv, resiliency chaos-engineering using Gremlin, and analytics capabilities using Amazon FinSpace.

If you were not able to attend, or would like to review or learn more about what took place at re:Invent, we’ve curated a recap of the most relevant content for financial services. In this recap guide you’ll find industry highlights and recommended sessions and keynotes along with links to watch them on demand. You’ll also find an overview of select new AWS services and features that were announced during re:Invent that are particularly relevant to financial services institutions (pages 54-62 of the guide), including new features in Amazon SageMaker, new capabilities for Amazon Connect, and a new AWS Mainframe Modernization service, to name just a few.

You can download the Recap Guide 2021 for Financial Services below. For a follow up discussion, please contact your AWS account team or one of our team members listed on pages 64-66 of the guide.