Many businesses have been modernizing since the early ’70s, adding technological advances to their stack in an effort to keep up with customer demands. But as the rate of transformation speeds, they find their progress impeded by a bloat of monolithic architecture and spaghetti tangle of code.

“We were pretty much putting up applications one on top of the other,” said Ricardo Guerra (pictured), chief information officer of Itaú Unibanco Holding S.A. “We were trying to move as fast as we could, but we were not taking the right care of the platform.”

Guerra spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed Itau’s evolving digital strategy. (* Disclosure below.)

Digital transformation is more than creating innovative solutions

Itaú is proud of its reputation for leading technical transformation in the South American finance sector. The 96-year-old company operates globally and is the largest private sector bank in Brazil, offering products from corporate banking to retail and from credit cards to investments.

Despite having started its digital transformation over a decade ago, Itaú found itself losing its innovative edge because of inflexible architecture and monolithic applications.

“To be able to leverage new technology, your platform has to be flexible. You have to be able to adopt those new technologies without losing a moment of offering your products and services,” Guerra stated.

In a moment of clarity, the IT team saw a way out of the tangle it had created: “Stop. We have to have a better platform. We have to reorganize ourselves. Otherwise, we’re going to get lost in ourselves,” Guerra said.

The bank realized it needed to invest in technology not only through producing innovative solutions in financial services, but by taking care of its platform and understanding how to correctly evolve it.

Three things had to change, according to Guerra. First was switching the company culture to become customer-centric.

“We have to have a new mindset, a new culture,” he said. “A mindset where we empower people in decisions. We have people thinking about the customer all the time and being aggressive building solutions for them.”

The second was changing the methodology the company used to deliver those solutions. “You have to have an agile methodology agile approach, as opposed to a traditional waterfall approach,” Guerra stated.

Third, and most importantly, was to break the monolith into microservices and create a flexible platform. This is where Itaú’s recent announcement of a 10-year partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. comes into play.

“Cloud is the perfect platform to host those services,” Guerra said. “We looked for a partner that was reliable, that was a leader in the market, [and] that was able to keep up with all the technology that is coming out in the market and offer innovation in the level that we needed.”

Microservices strategy allows Itaú to rebuild its platform little by little

Creating an internal team to rebuild the platform from scratch was an option Guerra rejected.

“That would take seven, eight, or nine years … and then we would be legacy again whenever we finished,” he said. Instead, the company decided to separate each segment of the business and empower them to modernize their own platform.

“They understand today that the platform is not a problem of technology, but it’s the business,” Guerra said. “So it’s very straightforward for them to understand that they have to break up the platform [and] they have to prioritize building microservices in the cloud so all the ideas and needs that they can identify will be much easier to implement.”

The bank is building microservices, according to Guerra. “We’re breaking up those [monolithic] applications so we can adapt faster to whatever we see that our customers need or any business opportunity there is,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE