If there is any vertical that understands the meaning of cost to a business, it’s the financial services industry. Yet, when evaluating the cost impact of running information technology in the cloud versus through a private data center, there are other factors of more importance in the world of banks and brokerages.

“Cost isn’t really the thing that people look to the most when it comes to cloud today,” said Scott Mullins (pictured), head of worldwide financial services business development at Amazon Web Services Inc. “It’s all about agility. Being able to go faster actually trumps cost from the standpoint of being the biggest value driver that we’re seeing our customers going after in financial services.”

Mullins spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) during the AWS Summit in NYC. They discussed how one AWS financial customer values the scale and speed offered by the cloud and new tools that can help satisfy compliance requirements (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Processing 155 billion events nightly

What translates into agility for AWS customers in the financial services space is managing high-volume transactions while running other critical services. At one AWS customer, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc., or FINRA, the firm can process 155 billion market events every night and run all of its surveillance routines at the same time, according to Mullins.

“You have access to a completely new toolkit,” Mullins said. “That’s been a really compelling thing for financial institutions. You don’t have to wait to get infrastructure provisioned for you.”

In addition to speed and agility, the public cloud provider also offers support in another important area for financial institutions: compliance. Last month, AWS announced general availability for Control Tower and Security Hub. The services offer a dashboard view of AWS security tools and provide an automated way to set up secure, compliant environments.

“Those are really interesting to financial services customers because they begin to help automate a lot of those compliance controls,” Mullins said. “You’ve seen us focus on how to actually make that easier for customers to do.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE