Capital One Software: The journey from bank to technology company

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This summer, after a years-long journey of creating and developing its own data management solutions, Capital One launched a new business line, Capital One Software, to sell data management and related software products that it had developed to other companies looking to move to the cloud. It represents the culmination of the bank's efforts to transform itself, its technology and its organization, as well as a goal to offer what it has learned along the way, and the solutions it has developed and tested, to help other companies achieve the same goal. processing.

VentureBeat spoke with Ravi Raghu, President, Capital One Software, International, Business Cards and Payments, about the story of Capital One's transformation, scaling up its own use of data and the cloud computing, then the creation of a company to sell its software to third parties.

go all in

According to Raghu, this journey began, in some ways, when Capital One was founded, since "data was at the heart of...our entire...journey as a strategy company based on information, and along the way we realized that…to be a truly recognized bank…to be a leading bank, we also had to be a great technology company.To do this, Capital One has to first ramped up its own use of data and cloud computing, which Raghu says was driven by a desire to provide “real-time, personalized experiences for our customers” and to become “more of a cloud-first business.”

"We said we were going to 'do it all' on the public cloud in 2016, we completed that journey in 2020," he said, and "this complete overhaul took the whole company, and we've all kind of come together, to make this happen. And that's what we have this opportunity to…grow this company called Capital One Software,” he says.

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What prompted Capital One to invest in building its own data management software and capabilities? Raghu said that to "be incredibly well managed, serving our banking customers" and "to operate at the scale at which we operate in the cloud", they first researched what was already available and then decided to create additional capacities. they needed internally.

In concrete terms, it was not only a technical transformation, but also an organizational transformation, which included the development of a technological workforce of 12,000 people, "the adoption of more such as Agile-based delivery, using restful APIs...microservices...leveraging the power of machine learning and AI [artificial intelligence]" and, in essence, becoming "a tech company in its own right."

"We realized early on that the bank of the future was actually a technology company", combining "the best of what technology companies have, and also the best of what...banks are known for, risk management.... [H]aving recognized this early on, we actually made some specific choices in our journey to becoming this technology company.”

A natural extension

Throughout the process of creating their own technologies, Raghu said, "We also heard feedback from companies we interacted with along the journey that...they would have loved to call on to our experts...