>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE virtual and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. We are theCUBE virtual and I'm your host Keith Townsend. Today I'm joined with Melanie Frank who is managing VP of technology at Capital One. Welcome to theCUBE Melanie >> Thanks for having me glad to be here. >> So first time on theCUBE, but you guys have done something big at Capital One. So we're not going to take it easy on you. This is, this has been hitting the news cycles. You guys have closed down your last data center. What spurred the, the initiative for Capital One to exit to private data center. >> Oh, there's so many cool technology, you think that we'll talk about, but you know, if you want to talk about why that is not tech for the sake of tech in this case, this is about working back from, from what our customer needs are. So I think of how the digital world has transformed our expectations as consumers, right. I, I actually was, I use a digital assistant a lot in the kitchen. And so the other day I was cooking and, you know, I update a shopping list to set a timer. I'm just used to doing those things. And the other day I actually asked my digital assistant to set my stove to 350 degrees, which I do not have a smart stove. It's not integrated with my digital assistant, nothing in my home has that capability right now, but it really kind of struck me as a wow, this whole, like this, this interaction has changed my expectations now for my entire kitchen. And I think that those types of experiences now are what we've come to expect as consumers. And that really was the center of it for us, our shift to cloud and exit of the data centers was all about our ability to provide our customers with experiences that are real-time and intelligent that you just can't do, if you're running on outdated technology in a data center. >> So I absolutely understand the benefits of when you're there. The other day, I was bringing up another circuit in our data center and I'm thinking our virtual data center and I'm thinking, wow, man, this is so easy. I can just issue a command software defined. And now the data centers has redundant connectivity, but getting there is a process can you talk to us about the process and how long it took for Capital One to actually reach that goal. >> Yeah, you know, you're so right. Like it is so nice once you're there, but it is not to be underestimated the, the transformational aspect of this, so this was a part of a massive eight year technology transformation, really. That was about modernizing the way in which we worked as well as the tech infrastructure itself. So our goal was to get to this destination where we were faster and more nimble, like you described with those new capabilities for those customers. But we're talking about this eight year transformation where we transformed our talent. We had to hire product managers, data scientists, designers. We shifted our developer skill sets. We're now sitting at an 11,000 person tech organization with 85% of that being, you know, engineers, we shifted the way we work to agile, is it is just much more conducive to that rapid delivery of value. And then of course, on the tech side, really since about 2014, we've closed eight data centers and rebuilt thousands of applications to take full advantage of the cloud technology and capabilities. >> Cool. So it goes without saying, you guys won the world's biggest financial organizations and you've highlighted the non-technical part of the journey. Can you provide a little bit of insight for us on the, kind of the, your partners within the bank, not just technologists in the technology organization, how was this not necessarily disruptive, but changing, you know, groups like audit your financial services. You're constantly worried about audit. How did audit embraced this change? >> Well, I think there was a huge learning for the entire organization to think about what, what parts of what we do need to be done differently. In some ways there were a lot of benefits if I think about our business partners in the finance team where, you know, you had a data center running with massive amounts of technology infrastructure, perhaps you had to size that technology infrastructure for your peak loads, for us during, you know, holiday shopping periods and things like that. And now we're at a position where we can much more nimbly control the tech. We can audit scale up, we can audit scale down that is much more cost-effective for us, for our business. And then from a financial perspective, you just take that use case for the finance department it's, you know, adjusting so that we can directly show that cost to the line of business and allow them to make the changes that they need, which makes sense for their business and their customers. >> So let's talk about more of that process and the journey from a technology perspective, as we look at something as mature as a bank's infrastructure, not all of those applications can be migrated easily and re-platformed easily. How did you guys deal with those tough last to move application, you know, that last 20%? >> Yeah. I think, you know, it early with that, for us with a declaration that, you know, kind of I'll say the easier part, anything new gets built into the cloud. And as you point out that is way easier than tackling some of those things that you you've probably been dealing with and tackling for a very, very long time, from an application standpoint. We knew early on that it would be better if we could modernize the applications themselves as we moved them to the cloud to really kind of unlock the advantages because there's one part of the advantages of the cloud infrastructure. There is a second part of what it forced was a application modernization and a tech modernization for us. And so those two things together were super powerful. We had a few stubborn ones that we said, okay, can we containerize this? Can we lift and shift this over it's, to me, it was likening to, you know, moving from one house to another and you've, you're kind of cleaning out your attic and you're trying to figure out, ideally, you don't take anything to the new house that you don't need and you do all this cleanup. And at some point you say, well, this I'm going to put in this box and I will deal with it kind of at the new house. And ideally you do that before you put it right back in the attic. So we had a few of those, but in large part, you know, 85%, I think that's, that's part of why it took us so long was let's, let's do this right. And let's get, get this so that these applications can run effectively and take full advantage of the cloud. >> So let's talk about some of the potential benefits and the past eight to nine months. My relationship with my commercial banker, with my private banker have really changed due to the pandemic. Talk to me about some of the advantages or capabilities the bank has gained as a result of moving all almost all. Well now totally to the public cloud. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. I think I'll start with one that is a little bit more technically oriented then talk about the capabilities. So, you mentioned the pandemic and we had, you know massive amounts of planning as we were kind of taking in the full impact of what was about to happen for our associates and our customers, you know and trying to think through how will customer behavior change during a pandemic? We didn't have a whole lot of indicators as to what that might look like. You know, how is their activity going to change from a transactions, for example, or, you know, are they going to change the frequency with which they're logging in online or paying the cloud gave us the flexibility. As you mentioned earlier to scale rapidly in case the projections that we were making were wrong about consumer behavior. And so we could keep the platforms up and running and recover them much quicker, more resilient infrastructure to make sure that it's up because we really we're in unprecedented times, trying to think through how, how behaviors and needs of customers would change. Secondly, you know, from a capability standpoint, we talked about the need for those real time intelligent experiences that only cloud can give you only modern applications can give you things like, you know Eno, our digital assistant, which is built on a streaming architecture, it can identify unusual charges, 40% tip and alert me in real time. You know, these days 40% tip, I'm trying to help local businesses, that's, that's exactly true. But the fact that Eno is out there kind of looking out and watching my back and saying, this is unusual is, is this you you're transacting a lot online who knows what the fraudsters are looking for. It's those types of experiences that, that you can't build. If you are posting transactions to a mainframe that, you know, runs a batch process overnight, it doesn't help me if you tell me the next day. >> So let's talk about this talent transformation a little bit too, because one of the most difficult things I've witnessed with any type of, of massive transformation like this is recruitment and retention of talent, not the industry hasn't quite built up the talent pool to support such massive transformations. How is this impacting your talent and recruitment processes? >> Yeah. So, massively. And the good news is, you know, given the amount of time we've been on this transformation, we had some time to allow that to adjust, you know, when we started and knowing that, that we were focused largely on AWS, we said, we'd be great if we could go find it, you know thousands of engineers who are, you know, deep experts in AWS, and they didn't necessarily exist at the time given that there, there aren't a whole lot of companies doing what we were doing at the time besides perhaps, you know, AWS themselves and Netflix and they're good partners to us. So we don't need to, to steal everybody's talent. And so we started early on with training and re-skilling our engineers, generally speaking, I find that engineers love using new things. And they in particular love learning newer technologies. I haven't found one yet who's kind of resistant and, you know, wanting to go back and learn COBOL or Fortran like I had to. And I was in college. So, you know, the fact that, that they could, could learn some of these modern tech help evolve and develop them, you know, really kind of push on, on some of the capabilities and, and partner with partners like AWS to enhance the capabilities that are out there. And that's, that's an engineer's dream. The fact that they had, we had plenty of time. We made the declaration that we were going to go all in on cloud. Well, before we targeted getting it done probably before we even knew how in the world we were going to get there, it gave folks plenty of time to think through the training. We provided massive amounts of, of access to learning and training certifications of, for, for everyone to develop the skills that they needed. And I think it's just been great and super fun from a talent perspective. >> I love that you mentioned Netflix, they've been another company that's been extremely public with their journey to the cloud. We kind of think of Netflix is just born in the cloud company and they weren't, and they had a journey to the cloud you share your journey to the cloud. What are some of the pieces of advice, the best practices you can give other companies looking to take that similar journey? >> I will say to, you know, not underestimate the transformative part, for us I think I've said it before. I'll I will say it again. This was not just a tech transformation, you know, this started with our customer needs. It started with a business strategy. It was transformative to our culture for how we, how we think about building and delivering capabilities, as well as the software, then that underlies and supports them. And so I think, you know, starting from a place of where are you trying to go and why? And giving yourself really the fortitude and commitment to achieve it, because you mentioned it, it is not necessarily easy. If you run on a yearly budget cycle, you if, unless you are, you know, running on very few applications at this point, you know, you will not get this done in kind of one year budget cycle, this is a multi-year journey. And ideally you're changing the technology itself, but also how software gets delivered. And therefore then as we just talked about the talent required to do so. >> So Melanie, we've been watching your journey for the past couple of years and we so appreciate you sharing your journey with theCUBE. More importantly, you're now a CUBE alum, and you get all the benefits of the CUBE alum, which has a great headshot that the team has shared, but we really appreciate you sharing a builder's journey at this builder's show. Stay tuned for more coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 via that you.. virtual. Thanks for joining us. (gentle upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm Lisa Martin and I have with me a cube alumni back, please. Welcome Scott Mullins, the worldwide financial services business development leader at AWS. Scott. Welcome back. Great to have you joining us, >>Lisa. It's great to be back on the cube and to be visiting with you today from virtual re-invent 2020. >>Yes. Reinventing reinvent. The last show that I got to host in-person for the cube was reinvent last year. And here we have this three week virtual event that started last week. So lots more even going on. I think I even saw a hundred thousand or so registered, so massive event, lots of news. So walk us through some of the highlights that have been announced at reinvent this year and some of the things that you're seeing the most interest from customers in. >>Well, I think one of the big highlights is 500,000 registrants that are reinvented 50,000 attendees last year to reinvent or 50,000 or so to 500,000 re registered for the event. So that's, that's, that's worth talking about in its own. Right. But I think, you know, one of the things, and you mentioned this, you know, more re-invent three weeks, uh, this year, as opposed to the four days that we normally spend in Las Vegas together, physically, when you do, when you do it digitally, you have the ability to actually include more things and more leaders talking about things. And so when we think about the announcements that are having impacts, uh, with financial services customers specifically I'd point to a couple of things and, you know, they're obviously gonna mention Andy's keynote, but there's going to be some things that you might go wait a minute. >>I didn't even see that announcement. Uh, and then maybe I could point you and the viewers to some other, other, um, keynotes or some other sessions that were announced. So obviously I think, uh, first and foremost in Andy's keynote, uh, hybrid, uh, was something that was a very, uh, big focus for him and I for a very long time, we've had the messaging of the right tool for the right job when it comes to any of your services. I think you could alter that today to say it's the right tool for the right job at the right time and in the right place. That makes sense for you and especially for financial institutions. Um, you could look at the announcements around containers, the announcements around Amazon EKS, distro, Amazon EKS, anywhere, and then also Amazon ECS anywhere, which allows our customers to actually, uh, put AWS container technology anywhere they would like to put it. >>You could look also at the additions of the one you and two you form factors to outposts. So no longer do you have to do the, the, the large for you, uh, foreign factor for outposts, smaller outposts for smaller spaces, uh, that particular will play well in the financial service industry. You may not have necessarily as much room for a full cabinet. You could also look from the hybrid perspective in the announcement we made, um, around red hat OpenShift on AWS, all of are giving customers the ability to choose how they actually want to deploy, um, and pursue a hybrid. I'd also point to some announcements we made around management and governance in the financial services, industry governance, uh, is a very important topic. Uh, we announced the management and government lens for the AWS well architected, um, uh, program, uh, that is focused on breath practices for evolving governance for the cloud. >>It has recommended combination of AWS services integrations with our partner network and vetted reference architectures and guidance for addressing regulatory obligations as well. I'd also point to some things we made around audits. I was specifically in Steve Smith's, um, session today, he talked about AWS audit manager. That's a new tool for continually assessing areas and environments for controls or risk compliance. That includes prebuilt compliance frameworks for things like PCI DSS and GDPR, uh, two things that are very important in the financial services industry and last, but certainly not least I'd point to the announcement around the AWS audit Academy. This is training for auditors to actually be able to audit clouds from an agnostic perspective. Any cloud, not specifically AWS that's tree, uh, digital training to do that. And then also an instructor led course specifically on how to audit AWS. So some very key announcements, both from the standpoint of services, uh, as well as additional layers of helping customers in the financial services industry in regulated industries actually use our services. >>So typical, re-invent typical in a lot of news, a lot of announcements, the 500,000 Mark in terms of registering. I hadn't heard that. That's amazing. Let's talk that this has been an Andy. Jassy had an exclusive with John furrier just a couple of weeks ago before. I think it was last week, actually. And we've been talking about this acceleration of digital business transformation because of COVID we've been talking about it, the entire pandemic on the virtual cube, talking about how companies it's really about right now, surviving and thriving to be able to go forward and companies that haven't accelerated are probably in some trouble. Talk to me about how AWS has been working with your financial services customers to help them pivot and move to the cloud faster, really to not just help them survive now, but thrive in the long-term. >>Yeah. Immediately when COVID hit and it hit at different times in different, in different parts of the world. Immediately when COVID hit, we saw the conversation that we were having turning from, Hey, what's my digital strategy to immediately, what are my digital capabilities? And what that really means is what do I have the ability to do tomorrow? Because tomorrow is going to really matter. I don't have necessarily the time to plan for the next several quarters or the next several years, what can I do tomorrow to, um, really, uh, support my, my own workforce and support my own customers and the obligations I have as a financial institution. The first thing we saw people do was to try and make sure that those who financial services work can work. You can look at the adoption of Amazon workspaces, as well as our, uh, Amazon connect, uh, call centers as a service. >>As two examples there at the RBL bank in India was able to move to Amazon workspaces in just 10 days to enable its teams to actually work remotely from home. When they couldn't come into the office, you can look at Barclays. Barclays is actually a presenter at re-invent this year. They'll have a session on how they use Amazon connect, which again is our call center as a service offering to enable 25,000 contacts and our agents to work from home when they can no longer work out of the, out of their traditional contact center. The second thing we saw a financial institutions joining was making sure that customer engagements could still be meaningful when digital was the only option, um, specifically here in the U S you could look at the work that each of us did with FinTech companies like biz two X or fins Zack, or BlueVine Stripe and cabbage in support of the care act in the U S you might remember that the cares act, um, hasn't provisions for funding for small businesses. >>This small business administration had a program called the paycheck protection program, and those organizations were active in providing funding, uh, to small businesses. Uh, through that program. I'll give you an example of cabbage cabbage had previously not been an SBA lender, um, but they were able to, in two weeks build a fully automated system for small businesses to access PPP funding using Amazon text track, to extract information from documentation that those folks submitted to get alone. That reduced approval times from multiple days to about a median of four hours to actually get approval, to get funding through the PPP program. And then just four months cabbage became the second largest PPP lender. They lent over $7 billion in funding, which was twice the amount of funding that they went last year in 2019 loans. So we were happy to support organizations like cabbage and those other FinTech companies, as they help small businesses in the U S get access to funding, uh, during this critical time. >>And as we know, as you said, critical time, but really life or death for a lot of businesses. And as we continue to go through these ways, but it's interesting that you talked about that the speed of facilitation that during such unprecedented times, AWS and this massive machine was able to continue moving at full speed ahead and helping those customers to pivot. You talked about the cloud connect. I had a conversation with a guest on the queue last week about that. And, and I now think about if I have to call in a contact center and that person might be from home. So, you know, we're fortunate that the cloud computing technology and people like you and AWS, or are able to power that because it's, it's literally essential, which is probably one of the words of the year, but being able to keep the machinery going and innovate at the same time has been, make or break for a lot of businesses. >>Absolutely. And you, you look at, you know, kind of one of the last year is that I'll point to is, um, financial institutions. Uh, anti-virus, we're were very much focused on making sure that that cannot fail, that they scaled. And so you can look at the work we did with, uh, with the, with FINRA FINRA is the primary capital markets regulator here in the U S and on a daily basis frame or processes about 400 billion market events on every night to do surveillance on our markets, that when COVID hit, we had unprecedented volume and volatility in the market. And FINRA was, was, um, looking at processing, uh, anywhere from two to three times, their normal daily market volumes that's anywhere from 800 billion market events to 1.2 trillion a night. And if you look at how they were able to scale, they're actually able to scale up compute resources in AWS. We're on a nightly basis. They're able to automatically turn on and off up to a hundred thousand compute nodes in a single day. That automatic ability to scale is, is the power you're talking about. Being able to actually turn things up when you needed it and turn things down when you, when you don't need it based on the volumes. >>Well, and that's going to be something key going forward. As we know that there will be one thing I think that I always say we can count on right now is uncertainty and continued uncertainty, but we've also seen I'm calling them COVID catalysts. You know, the, what you talked about with cabbage, for example, and how that business pivoted quickly, because of the power of cloud computing and emerging technologies, what are some of the things that you think as we go into 2021 in the financial services arena, what are some of the big tech trends that you think were maybe born during COVID that are going to be critical going forward? >>Well, you know, you, you, you had Melanie Frank from capital one on cube a couple of days ago, and she was talking about, you know, their shift to cloud and what that's really enabled, and it, and she kind of sums it up nicely. She says, look, we want to give our customers experience that are real time, and that are intelligent. And you just can't do that with legacy technology. That's sitting in, you know, kind of a legacy data center. And so I think that's going to be kind of the, the, the all encompassing statement for what's happening in the financial services industry. As I mentioned, you know, organizations overnight said, okay, wait a minute, let's take that strategy. And then let's put it aside. Let's talk about capabilities. What can we do? And I think, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. Um, and when you're faced with limitations and challenges, like we all have been faced with around the world and not just in the financial services industry, it, it breeds, um, invention and the, and the desire and the need to actually meet those challenges head on, in very engineered of ways. >>And I think you're going to see more invention and specifically more invention from the established players in the financial services industry. Cloud use is not just experimental on the edges anymore. You're going to see more organizations coming out of COVID. Um, having had those experiences where they actually stood up a context center and scaled it. And, and just a matter of a few days to, to thousands of agents, you're going to find, um, organizations saying, wait a minute, we, we can do remote work. We could, we have access to things like Amazon workspaces. So I think you're, you're gonna, you're going to see that, uh, be a, be a trend. I think you're also gonna see, um, w what Lori beer said in the keynote with Andy, you know, she, she made a very, very astute statement, and I don't know if people caught it, cause it's kind of neat in the middle of her conversation. >>She said, look, we're trying to infuse analytics into everything that we do at JP Morgan. I think you're going to see more and more financial institutions looking to do that, to actually leverage the power of analytics, to power everything we do as a financial institution. So I think those, those are a couple of things that you're going to see. Um, and then, you know, looking, uh, you know, kind of around the corner, I think you're going to continue to see more re-invention within the industry. And what I mean by that is you've seen many financial institutions over the last week, uh, with, uh, re-invent making announcements, you saw bank and we towel saying, Hey, look, we are completely transforming ourselves with AWS. Uh, just a few weeks before we even saw standard charter, the same thing HSBC said, the same thing, global payments earlier in the year said the same thing. And you're going to see more and more organizations coming out and talking about these strategic decisions to reinvent everything that they do to make the financial systems of the world work. And so we're really pleased to be partnering with those organizations to make those transformations possible. We're seeing a lot of invention within the industry, and we're very pleased to be a part of the reinvention of the financial systems around the world. >>It's interesting to hear that you, you see, even the JP Morgan, some of those legacy, big houses are going to be really pivoting. They have to, to be competitive and to be able to utilize analytics, to deliver those real-time services. Because as we all know, as consumers, our patients is wearing thin these days, but I agree with you. I think there's a lot of opportunity there that innovation is exciting and there will have to be reinvention of entire industries, but I think there's a lot of silver linings there. Scott. I wish we had more time, cause I know we could keep talking, but thank you for sharing your insights on this reinvented reinvent this year. >>I appreciate it. Thank you, Lisa. It's always a pleasure to be on the cube. >>Chris Scott Mullins, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.