Capital One Software: The journey from bank to technology company
Summary
This summer, after a yearslong journey creating and developing its own data management solutions, Capital One launched a new line of business, Capital One Software, to sell the data management and related software products it had developed to other companies who are looking to transition to the cloud. Going all in According to Raghu, this journey began, in some ways, back in the founding days of Capital One, since “data was at the heart of … our whole… journey as an information-based strategy company, and along the way, we realized that … to be a really well-recognized bank … to be a top bank, we also needed to be a great technology company.” To do so, Capital One first scaled up its own use of data and cloud computing, which Raghu said was driven by the desire to provide “real-time personalized experiences for our customers,” and becoming “more of a cloud-first company.” “We declared that we would go ‘all in’ on the public cloud in 2016, we completed that journey in 2020,” he said, and “that entire overhaul took the entire company, and all of us kind of rallying together, to pull that off. “And so the point of Capital One Software is to really take all the things that we have battle-tested … and give it to companies that are looking to more effectively operate on the cloud.” The Capital One Software business, Raghu said, therefore represents a natural extension of the investment and innovation Capital One has put into developing solutions and transforming itself into “a technology company that also does banking.” He explained that “[i]t is taking the experience that we’ve had in our journey, and helping other companies really compress the time that they take to innovate for their customers. Consumption involves taking data and delivering insights that companies can use in developing their strategies and business plans. “[I]t gives me personally the confidence to go out and tell the customer … ‘I actually know this is valuable, because we are using it ourselves.’” The size and scope of the effort and investment they’ve put into this venture certainly lends weight to that statement; other solutions may thicken the plot even further.
