Amazon woos banking sector with cloud computing service
Amazon is seeking to gain a toe-hold in the banking sector by offering its cloud computing expertise to industry big-hitters such as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.
Amazon Web Services is inviting these companies to rent its servers to perform computationally heavy tasks as a cheaper alternative to building their own online infrastructure, although it faces a challenge reassuring institutions where security and privacy are key that their data is safe.
This would offer banks the flexibility to hire processing and storage capacity in real-time in response to customer demand, supporting services such as mobile banking apps as well as forecasting risk and disaster operations.
One business to take the plunge, Capital One Financial, has been able to close five of its eight data centres since making the move
Up till now Amazon has focussed on consumer-facing firms such as Netflix where the regulatory environment is less onerous but a decision by no less than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to procure its cloud services in 2013.
That decision prompted Amazon to seek further diversification of its fast growing web services division where sales have jumped 70 per cent over the past year to hit $7.88bn, far outstripping the 20 per cent growth in sales to $107bn for Amazon as a whole.