Capital One on AWS

Capital One exited eight on-premises data centers by migrating to AWS, transforming the customer experience in the process. Founded in 1994, the “digital bank” uses technology to help its customers succeed. Capital One scaled its technology team to 11,000 members, adding software engineers and developers to build innovative customer experiences using AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Lambda. 

To best understand Capital One and its long-term strategy, it helps to think of the company not as a bank—despite the fact that the diversified financial services company is, in fact, one of the ten largest US banks by assets and deposits—but as a digital technology company that offers banking services. At Capital One, the central motivating belief is that the winners in next-generation banking will be the companies that make the most creative and innovative use of technology to provide seamless, intelligent, truly excellent customer experiences.

One of the ways Capital One achieved companywide buy-in for its cloud-first policy—under which all new applications are architected for and deployed in the cloud—was by implementing a robust cloud-computing training program. That program was successful partly because of the wide net that it cast, offering carefully designed and tailored training not only to the engineers who would work directly on AWS but also to the business executives and other non-technical stakeholders who needed to be able to understand and advocate for cloud computing's transformational potential.

Capital One trained contact-center associates in 30 minutes and achieved 100 percent adoption in 5 months using Amazon Connect. With the flexibility of Amazon Connect, Capital One can add new features in weeks instead of the 3–6 months required by its previous solution.

Capital One is one of the largest banks in the US and the largest digital bank. As consumers continue to forgo the brick-and-mortar for the digital-first, Capital One has embraced new technologies, adopting and applying AWS-backed AI and ML solutions to nearly every facet of the business and infusing the customer experience with intelligence. And because AWS is just as secure—and oftentimes more secure—than an on-premises data center, Capital One is able to apply these innovations while upholding its responsibility to protect customers and their data.

Capital One is well known for its early adoption of new technologies to help it transform the banking customer experience. Less obvious, but no less crucial, are the practices and mindsets that position Capital One to make such effective use of those new technologies—practices and mindsets that are the result of the company's conscious self-transformation into a digital technology company. The company’s recent embrace of DevOps is just the latest step.