Fintech’s digital revolution requires powerful computing infrastructure to meet consumer expectations. The smartphone-first crowd is cashless and contactless. At the edge, transactions are instant and abundant.

Processing tens of billions of transactions a year, Total System Services LLC ranks among of the largest payment processors in the world. Last year TSYS began a partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc. to expand the cloud capabilities of cashless payments.

“Our goal and our vision is to build out a financial services cloud for all of our clients and our retailers and fintech,” said Scott Carter (pictured), chief technology officer of TSYS. “We built, using a variety of AWS technology, both on-premises and in the cloud, to migrate our processing platforms and all of our customer servicing systems.”

Carter spoke with Lisa Martin and David Nicholson, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed TSYS’ partnership with AWS, its digital transformation journey, the roles and challenges of CTOs, and more. (* Disclosure below.)

In fintech, computing infrastructure matters

Fintech faces tight regulations and high consumer expectations, so computing infrastructure matters, according to Carter. Running some of the world’s largest authorization platforms, the majority of consumers have touchpoints with TSYS applications.

“When you go into the store and swipe your card, you have to get a response back from us. We have to give you that — we have a really specific amount of time to give that back to you,” Carter said.

It was for this reason that TSYS chose AWS for its own modernization efforts, a decision extending beyond just the CTO’s office.

“It was really a group decision, I have to partner with our business team. I have to get their buy-in,” Carter said. “It’s a big investment we’re making moving to the cloud. We have to cover the bases. [Our platform partner] has got to be able to at least provide the operational support and reliability we’re able to give our customers today.”

Deeper integration with AWS is in the immediate pipeline for TSYS as the company merges legacy and cloud native resources.

“We’re going to be able, in 2022, to make some key announcements around some parts of our platform. They’re going to be available in AWS as an offering. A lot of our customer servicing and some of the things we do outside of our core processing platform are already cloud native. We run them in a cloud environment on our premise,” Carter explained.

The modernization efforts have also driven resources to upskilling employees, with boot camps and certifications topping Carter’s priority list. The investment in cloud-ready talent ultimately helped TSYS with its ongoing migration, an initiative that began more than five years ago.

“We were able to bring in some skill sets in DevOps — nowadays we do a lot with machine learning and artificial intelligence skill sets. We were able to build in a lot of cloud skills and start to build out our development environments first,” Carter said. “We use those development environments for our engineers to cut their teeth and really get comfortable in the cloud.”

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: PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither PwC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE