Billion-dollar AWS financial services investment builds on a decade of work
September 4, 2026
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.”
Embedded AWS
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.
Right place, right time
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.
“When you think about the investments you have to make to build out foundation models and inference, and then do that at scale to keep up with the pace of innovation in the industry, it’s hard to imagine even our largest customers doing that themselves,” said Kain.
Part of the legacy left behind at customers by AWS is vastly improved efficiency in customer development teams. Kain said developer productivity improvements are “remarkable”, with the ability to get from business idea to actual code and then into production being achieved 70% quicker than before.
Beyond the new
AI technology is also helping firms to replace outdated legacy systems without losing functionality. One bank benefitting from this is Denmark’s Danske Bank. As part of its Forward ’28 strategy, which includes its digital transformation plans, the bank began working with AWS in 2024.
The first phase of the project saw it work with AWS to build a migration platform that has been used to move legacy applications to the cloud. The latest extention has seen the bank harness the provider’s cloud, AI and engineering resources to develop digital customer services.
“Danske Bank is a good example of using generative tools, not to try to translate the code, but explain to what the code’s doing from a business logic perspective,” said Kain. “Then they take those business requirements and put them through new GenAI coding tools and build new applications off the business requirements, not off the legacy code.”
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 John Kain, AWS
With the increased reliance on suppliers such as AWS, Microsoft and Google, it’s easy to question how finance firms will compete through internal resources. With equal access to tech from the suppliers, Kain stressed that their data and cultures are the differentiators for finance firms.
“As you have to take advantage of these new technologies, it’s a transformation – not just the technology part, but the business has to think about how quickly it can develop products and actually deploy them,” he added.
The transformation of the likes of AWS in the finance sector has not escaped finance regulators across the world, with calls in the UK for firms such as Amazon to be subject to stringent rules. This is hardly surprising when a 24-hour outage affecting major AWS or Microsoft Azure cloud regions in the UK, Ireland, Europe or the east side of the US could trigger major economic disruption across the UK, causing direct revenue losses of between £650m and £1bn, according to a report from the UK’s Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC).
UK financial services regulators now oversee IT suppliers that the finance sector relies on to operate. Four suppliers – the local operations of AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Oracle – are initially being regulated, labelled critical third parties (CTPs).
From July this year, the four firms – which provide critical infrastructure that underpins the UK finance sector, such as cloud services – have been regulated by the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). More could eventually fall under the same regulation.
Kain accepts that today AWS is firmly under the regulatory gaze: “As AWS gets larger, we understand that we’ll attract more scrutiny, and [we’ve] worked with that even before some of the direct regulation mandates came out.”
