Why Capital One Attended
Rob Alexander , CIO
I felt extremely privileged to have the opportunity to represent Capital One as part of this year ’ s keynote at AWS re : Invent this October . Most people know Capital One as a credit card company , and we ’ re one of the largest in the US with more than 65 million accounts . Some also know that we ’ re one of the nation ’ s largest banks – number 7 in the U . S . by assets - and that we ’ re the nation ’ s leading digital bank .
Few realize , however , that underpinning our credit card and banking services is a technology company . I was honored to help introduce the re : Invent attendees to this critical , but often less seen , face of Capital One . Our products are intangible : software and data . Our customers overwhelmingly apply for our products through digital channels and are serviced through those channels . Digital is truly changing the way we interact with our money , and what is especially striking is the degree to which mobile has become the preferred channel of interaction for our customers . In fact our customers now use our mobile apps twice as frequently than online .
We ’ re An Innovative Technology Company
Since our business is really about building digital experiences , we have to be great at building software and leveraging data to be the leaders in digital banking . At Capital One , it isn ’ t enough to have a slightly better IT shop than other banks . We have to be a great technology company . This means modeling
ourselves on the best technology organizations out there , including :
• Massively investing in top engineering talent ;
• Building software collaboratively , leveraging open source software and contributing back to the community ;
• Delivering software using Agile methodologies , implementing DevOps to speed our software delivery process ;
• Developing software on a REST API microservices architecture , and
• Leveraging big and fast data technologies to enable real-time decisioning .
Why We ’ re Attracted to Cloud
Over the last couple of years , Cloud has become central to our technology strategy and AWS has become an important partner for Capital One . Like many big enterprises we began using the Cloud in a more experimental way ( grass roots and developer-driven ) in our labs and development teams . We quickly realized we could leverage the Cloud for development and test efforts more broadly , and have since begun running more critical production workloads .
We view the Cloud as game-changing , as it allows us to invest in building great applications for our cus-
30 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2016