Amazon Web Services Inc. has landed a major new customer in the financial services sector.

The Western Union Company said today it has chosen Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing company as its “preferred long-term strategic cloud provider” and will press ahead with plans to move “a significant portion” of its computing infrastructure to the public cloud giant’s platform.

Western Union is one of the most recognizable financial services companies in the world, providing payment and remittance services in more than 200 countries worldwide. It’s planning to migrate its massive business operation from its current, legacy data center infrastructure to a microservices-based architecture in Amazon’s cloud, so it will be able to build and support new applications without worrying about scale or complexity.

One reason for the move is that Western Union is keen to take advantage of the numerous specialized services AWS offers around new technologies such as machine learning and data analytics. The payment provider believes it can leverage those services to automate a huge bulk of its business operations and also add self-healing capabilities to its money transfer platform. In addition, it will use Amazon’s Aurora and DynamoDB databases to speed up its payment processing and boost the number of transactions it can handle.

Western Union Chief Information Officer Amit Sharma said AWS would also support the rollout of new services and products. He pointed to the company’s new Amazon PayCode service for users in the U.S., Chile, Colombia, Peru, the Philippines, Thailand, Jamaica, Kenya and other countries, which allows them to buy products on Amazon.com using their local currency via Western Union’s network.

“This omnichannel platform is just one of the strategic initiatives we will move forward with using the scalability and functionality of AWS to innovate,” Sharma said.

Mike Clayville, AWS’s vice president of worldwide commercial sales, said Western Union would be able to make better business decisions by analyzing the vast amounts of data it stores in its cloud.

“Already a leader in international money transfers, Western Union is not content to stand still, so they are working with AWS to drive even more business advantage in this highly competitive, and increasingly digital, industry,” Clayville said.

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