Capital One to shift core applications to Amazon over the next five years

Financial services company to use AWS platform for development and testing

Credit card firm Capital One is planning to migrate core business and customer applications to AWS over the next five years.

Capital One CIO Rob Alexander said the move would help the company become more agile in its technology strategy as it embraces a cloud-first ethos for its development processes.

"Technology is going to play a central role in the future of banking as we move toward an experience that is real-time, digital-first, and that anticipates customer needs," he said.

"The AWS Cloud enables fast, efficient development and deployment of software and allows our teams to focus on what we do best - building great software and delivering innovative experiences to our customers."

AWS was obviously keen to tout the deal as a coup for its services with Mike Clayville, vice president of Worldwide Sales at AWS saying it underlines how comfortable businesses of all types are becoming with using the cloud.

"Cloud has become the new normal even for the most highly regulated, data-sensitive organizations like those in the financial services industry," he said.

"Such organisations are making the cloud a core part of their central IT operations and digital transformation efforts to take advantage of the security, reliability, and broad functionality of the AWS Cloud.

"As a leading financial services institution, Capital One is embracing cutting-edge technology, like the AWS Cloud, to innovate in an industry that has great potential to benefit from technology transformation."

Announcing the deal so openly is no doubt AWS's plan to try and entice other firms in similar sectors to reconsider the cloud, with some no doubt put off in the past by concerns over data hosting and security in another firm's data centre.