- Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan recently revealed that the financial giant is saving $2 billion per year by building its own cloud
During a recent earnings call, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan recently revealed that the financial giant built its own private cloud software rather than outsourcing that work to companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Bank of America had to spend a lot to build its own cloud, including a $350 million charge in 2017. This decision helped reduce Bank of America’s servers to 70,000 from 200,000. And Bank of America now has 23 data centers rather than 60. This has led to $2 billion in annual infrastructure savings.
A number of analysts were betting against Bank of America’s ability to reduce billions off of its annual expenses. Moynihan pointed out that the company would operate this year on about $53 billion whereas many analysts estimated it would be $57 billion.
Business Insider reported that Bank of America has a $10 billion annual technology budget and it has a wide range of investments in innovative products like chatbots and mobile app improvements.
Bank of America’s efforts to build its own private clouds started in 2013. And the cloud expenses have been reduced by about 40%.
Some of the other technology highlights that were mentioned on the call include an 86% jump in mobile logins and 39% in wire transactions. And digital payments increased 29% to $424 billion compared to Q3 2017.
Bank of America chief technology officer Howard Boville revealed that the company also has a better idea of its client interactions — which are now 26 million people daily. This includes ATM cards not working or credit card transactions taking a longer amount of time to be approved.
Along with Boville, Bank of America chief operations and technology officer Cathy Bessant is overseeing the cloud server initiatives.
