Goldman Sachs gives AWS the financial services nod of approval

Dive Brief:

Goldman Sachs is migrating production of its securities database, Goldman Sachs Marquee, to Amazon Web Services, said David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, speaking on the keynote stage at AWS' annual conference re:Invent Tuesday in Las Vegas. The financial services company will deliver new products and services to clients directly on the platform starting next year.
Goldman Sachs customers use Marquee to access services directly through its APIs. In a developer-focused play, the goal is to be companies' "first choice to provide services that enable you to build financial functionality directly into your applications and workflows," Solomon said.
Working with AWS, Goldman Sachs wants to boost the simplicity of financial technology, evolving the "powerful and fast" capabilities of the sector to adapt to the "elegance and simplicity" of consumer-oriented and high tech capabilities.

Dive Insight:

The partnership between AWS and Goldman Sachs is evolving. Though Goldman Sachs works with a few cloud providers, Solomon credits AWS as the first because of its capabilities and pace of innovation.

Cloud technology allows Goldman Sachs to do their job in a simple way while accounting for the complexities of financial services. It also ensures its work is "safe, secure and responsible," Solomon said.

In September, Goldman Sachs named Marco Argenti, the former VP of technology at AWS, as its partner and co-chief information officer. Goldman Sachs has not unveiled a cloud strategy focused on one provider, as other financial services companies have, but continues to expound AWS' security and capabilities.

It's a major pitch given the pressure Capital One is facing related to its cloud strategy and the reliability of AWS following its breach announced in July.

The company can highlight a product release from earlier this year as a sign of cloud-based success. Goldman Sachs built the credit card platform which underpins Apple Card in partnership with Apple, Mastercard and AWS. With the cloud, Goldman Sachs could deliver capabilities digitally and at scale, Solomon said.

Solomon's pitch toward usability and developer-friendly technology was not Goldman Sachs' first time at re:Invent. Besides Solomon's 15-minute DJ set before the keynote began, in 2017, Goldman Sachs illustrated how it was working with AWS on its key management services for increased data privacy.