Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that Itaú Unibanco Holding (NYSE: ITUB), Latin America’s largest bank, has selected AWS as its long-term strategic cloud provider. Itaú Unibanco will leverage the world’s leading cloud to accelerate its digital transformation and enhance the banking experience for its 56 million customers around the world. As part of the 10 year deal, which expands on the bank’s existing relationship with AWS, Itaú Unibanco will move the majority of its IT infrastructure off mainframes and out of its on-premises data centres to the cloud. Itaú Unibanco will also migrate its core banking platforms, call centre solutions, online, and mobile banking applications to AWS, creating a more flexible and efficient technology architecture that will help the bank to introduce new customer-facing services faster with lower operating costs. In addition, the bank will leverage AWS’s proven infrastructure and breadth and depth of services, including capabilities for analytics, machine learning, serverless, containers, managed database, compute, storage, and security, to gain agility and insights, helping it pursue new lines of business, develop new applications, and ensure security and regulatory compliance. The bank also plans to upskill thousands of its employees, expanding on the 1,300 professionals the company has already trained in advanced cloud technologies, to put new customer service ideas into development faster.
Itaú Unibanco is expanding its use of AWS’s comprehensive portfolio of capabilities across its banking, credit cards, and insurance lines of business, as well as throughout its subsidiaries, such as Rede, one of the largest electronic payment solution providers in Brazil. The bank leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to provide secure, scalable compute capacity for Pix, Brazil’s first nationwide digital instant payment platform that helps reduce reliance on cash and credit card-based transactions. Similarly, Itaú Unibanco uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Lambda (AWS’s serverless computing service), to quickly launch and scale new financial services offerings, including iti, the bank’s free digital account platform that allows users to scan QR codes to easily and securely pay for products and services and transfer funds. By modernising Credicard, one of Brazil's largest credit card platforms, on AWS Itaú Unibanco can create a digital payment and banking platform that can easily incorporate new features to meet evolving customer needs. Looking ahead, Itaú will migrate off legacy databases to AWS’s cloud-native databases, such as Amazon Aurora (AWS’s relational database) and Amazon DynamoDB (AWS’s key-value database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale with built-in encryption and data recovery) to quickly, reliably, and securely process financial transactions and build new applications that feature microservices architectures to support scalability and simplify updates.
Itaú Unibanco is also leveraging AWS analytics and machine learning technologies to gain deeper insights into its customers’ banking needs and deliver more personalised experiences. For instance, the bank is using Amazon SageMaker (AWS’s service that enables data scientists and developers to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly) to identify patterns in individual customer’s banking habits and then use that information to help the bank’s customer service chatbots proactively offer assistance and deliver faster and more precise answers to customer questions. Itaú Unibanco is creating a company-wide machine learning platform on AWS to further expand innovation, automate workflows, and generate predictive insights.
“Banking is all about delivering value to customers and AWS helps us improve the time to value in every aspect of our business while expanding the benefits of digital payments to our customers. We are pursuing a complete digital transformation on AWS, moving off legacy mainframe technology, and using its portfolio of services to gain insights and agility that will make us even more responsive to our customers’ needs. At the same time, we’re investing in our employees, training them in the most advanced cloud technologies so that they can continuously innovate on behalf of the individuals and businesses we serve,” said Candido Bracher, CEO of Itaú Unibanco. “We chose AWS because of its breadth of capabilities, high levels of security, global infrastructure, and strong financial services experience. We see AWS as a strategic collaborator, and we look forward to aggressively expanding our footprint in the cloud to help our customers’ financial dreams come true.”
“AWS is helping Itaú Unibanco deliver the transformative benefits of online banking and digital payments to its customers in Latin America and around the globe. By migrating its core applications to the world’s leading cloud, Itaú Unibanco can rely on the proven performance, scale, and unparalleled portfolio of capabilities of AWS to complete its transformation into an agile, more customer-centric business,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Financial institutions rely on AWS for our secure, resilient global cloud infrastructure and services, industry expertise, and expansive network of partners. We continuously innovate so that AWS customers like Itaú Unibanco have the best resources to grow their businesses and meet rapidly changing customer behaviors and expectations.”
