Walk into a bank branch today and the scene is usually a row of teller windows flanked by employees in business attire having hushed conversations in nearby cubicles. Yet, Capital One Financial Corp. is working to change that image by opening a string of branches in major U.S. cities where customers are more likely to get a latte with extra foam instead of a deposit slip.

At a Capital One Café, bank employees generally wear T-shirts and provide financial coaching while visitors lounge on couches and sip drinks supplied by Peet’s Coffee. It’s symbolic of how one financial institution is transforming not only what goes on in its brick-and-mortar locations, but within its information technology operation as well, because Capital One has gone cloud first.

“We’ve actually built our primary customer-servicing application that our customers use every day native in the cloud,” said Jim Goode (pictured, right), senior director of product and portfolio delivery at Capital One. “To get the features to customers they want on a regular basis is to be very nimble and use strategies like DevOps. And the cloud really puts us in a position to do that.”

Goode spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit in Las Vegas. He was joined by Chad Duncan (pictured, left), managing director and cloud advisory lead at Accenture LLP, and they discussed the move of core banking services to the cloud and the benefits of finding critical information more easily. (* Disclosure below.)

Moving beyond legacy systems

Capital One’s cloud first journey originated in 2015 when it announced that new applications would run in the cloud while it re-architected existing ones for the new platform. Working with Amazon Web Services Inc. and Accenture, the bank was able to move beyond its legacy core systems and complex operating rules to a new infrastructure.

“You can run core banking in the cloud. Capital One is doing that,” Duncan said. “They don’t consider themselves a financial institution really. They consider themselves a technology company.”

Moving to the cloud has enabled the bank to find and use information in different and more effective ways, according to Goode. “As we move new applications to the cloud, we’re able to use information that’s now available to us that wasn’t available to us before,” he said. “Looking forward, we’re in a much better place. And we now know what we have and are able to track it very well.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit event. Neither Accenture LLP, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE