Amazon Web Services (AWS) began heavily targeting the financial services sector a decade ago and has transformed its offering in line with a changing sector.
Some 10 years ago, the promise of unlimited computing power on a pay-as-you-go basis was a huge differentiator. AWS, as well as a few of its tech hyperscale competitors, enabled this, but today AWS is more than a pipe into a customer tech engine.
The supplier jumped in with the world’s biggest banks’ early doors. “Our initial focus was on the big firms because of the complexity of their businesses,” John Kain, AWS’s global head of financial services market development told Computer Weekly. “The focus on them set a high bar for us in our ability to … operate on a global scale in a regulated market.”
The likes of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays and HSBC became “partners” rather than customers on press statements – a term that arguably fits in with the legacies being built by both sides.
Kain said that finance firms were concerned about security, compliance and governance as they adopted AWS technology to provide the flexibility and power they needed, adding: “We’re deliberate in the way we approached the industry.”
A decade or so on and the firm’s latest “billion-dollar” investment, known as Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), sees it embed generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) experts in its financial services user bases.
At first glance this might have the scent of more traditional outsourcing, but not according to Kain. The programme “helps build the tech foundations customers need in the age of GenAI,” he said. “We know a lot of our customers certainly need help driving generative AI innovation in their own firms.”
FDE teams are cross-functional, made up of technical, scientific and financial services business experts. Kain himself began his professional life as a technologist and moved into the business side, which he describes as a “snug fit”.
“I started my career as a technologist and then over time shifted a little bit more to the business side of things,” he added. “One of the great joys of financial services is that it’s a very technology-driven industry – if you understand the technology, you tend to understand the business as well.”
While this appears to describe the outsourcing industry in general, Kain insists there is a difference: “Not only do teams help drive the business challenges but they leave behind a foundation of GenAI infrastructure and processes that help firms accelerate on top of that, instead of just doing one-off projects.”
The FDE is sold through a professional contract, but Kain said the relationship will change as customers become more self-sufficient: “The FDE team is helping customers become self-sufficient and get to scale on their own.”
Now, it’s not just big banks that are working closely with AWS on the latest and greatest, but also payment system providers and stock exchanges as well as other giants of the industry.
A decade ago, AWS found itself at the beginning of a revolution in the finance sector with its on-demand cloud computing capacity piped into firms on a pay-as-you-consume basis. This set the foundations for the AI-driven technology revolution now being lived.
“It’s almost impossible to imagine that firms could adopt GenAI as quickly as they have without the benefit of being able to use cloud infrastructure like AWS to take advantage of that technology,” said Kain.
But tech giants such as AWS now go beyond providing the raw compute power and – as with AWS’s FDE programme – are providing hands-on experience and support to customers adopting the latest technologies, such as AI.
