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, adding software engineers and developers to build innovative customer experiences using AWS services such as Amazon EC2, 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 U.S. 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 five months using Amazon Connect. Capital One is one of the largest banks in the United States and offers credit cards, checking and savings accounts, auto loans, rewards, and online banking services for consumers and businesses. The flexibility of Amazon Connect allows the company to add new features in weeks instead of the three to six months required by its previous solution.

Using AWS, Capital One turns data into insights through machine learning, allowing the company to quickly innovate on behalf of its customers. Capital One is one of the largest banks in the United States and offers credit cards, checking and savings accounts, auto loans, rewards, and online banking services for consumers and businesses. Capital One uses AWS services including Amazon S3 to power its machine-learning innovation.

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 the company 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.