 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Sponsored by Intel and AWS. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. I'm Lisa Martin and I have with me a CUBE alumni back. Please welcome Scott Mullins, the Worldwide Financial Services Business Development Leader at AWS. Scott, welcome back, great to have you joining us. Lisa, it's great to be back on theCUBE and to be visiting with you today from virtual re-invent 2020. Yes, re-inventing re-invent. The last show that I got to host in person for theCUBE was re-invent last year. And here we have this three week virtual event that started last week. So lots more even going on. I think I even saw a hundred thousand or so registrants. So mass of the event, lots of news. So walk us through some of the highlights that have been announced at re-invent this year and some of the things that you're seeing the most interest from customers in. Well, I think one of the big highlights is 500,000 registrants that re-invent. Oh, wow. 50,000 attendees last year at re-invent or 50,000 or so to 500,000 registrants for the event. So that's worth talking about in its own right. But I think one of the things, and you mentioned this, more re-invent three weeks this year as opposed to the four days that we normally spend in Las Vegas together physically, when you do it digitally, you have the ability to actually include more things and more leaders talking about things. And so when we think about the announcements that are having impact with financial services customers specifically, I'd point to a couple of things. And I'm obviously going to mention Andy's keynote, but there's going to be some things that you might go, wait a minute, I didn't even see that announcement. And then maybe I can point you and the viewers to some other keynotes or some other sessions that were announced. So obviously I think first and foremost in Andy's keynote hybrid was something that was a very big focus for him. And for a very long time, we've had the messaging of the right tool for the right job when it comes to AWS services. I think you could alter that today to say, it's the right tool for the right job at the right time and in the right place that makes sense for you. And especially for financial institutions, you could look at the announcements around containers, the announcements around Amazon EKS distro, Amazon EKS anywhere, and then also Amazon ECS anywhere, which allows our customers to actually put AWS container technology anywhere they would like to put it. You could look also at the additions of the 1U and 2U form factors to outposts. So no longer do you have to do the large for you form factor for outposts, smaller outposts for smaller spaces, that particular play well in the financial service industry may not have necessarily as much room for a full cabinet. You could also look from the hybrid perspective of the announcement we made around Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, all of these are giving customers that the ability to choose how they actually want to deploy and pursue hybrid. I'd also point to some announcements we made around management and governance in the financial services industry. Governance is a very important topic. We announced the management and government lens for the AWS well architected program. That is focused on breath practices for evolving governance for the cloud. It has recommended combination of AWS services, integrations with our partner network and vetted reference architectures and guidance for addressing regulatory applications as well. I'd also point to some things we made around audit, specifically in Steve Schmidt's session today, he talked about AWS audit manager. That's a new tool for continually assessing AWS and environments for controls or miscompliance. That includes pre-built compliance framework for things like PCI DSS and GDPR. Two things that are very important in the financial services industry. And last but certainly not least, I'd point to the announcement around the AWS Audit Academy. This is training for auditors to actually be able to audit clouds from an agnostic perspective, any cloud, not specifically AWS. That's free digital training to do that. And then also an instructor led course specifically on how to audit AWS. So some very key announcements, both from the standpoint of services, as well as additional layers of helping customers in the financial services industry and regulated industries actually use our services. So typical re-invent, typical in a lot of news, a lot of announcements, the 500,000 mark in terms of registrants I hadn't heard that that's amazing. Let's talk to, this has been, Andy Jassy had an exclusive with John Furrier just a couple of weeks ago before I think it was last week actually. And we've been talking about this acceleration of digital business transformation because of COVID. We've been talking about it the entire pandemic on the virtual cube, talking about how companies, it's really about right now surviving, thriving to be able to go forward and companies that haven't accelerated are probably in some trouble. Talk to me about how AWS has been working with your financial services customers to help them pivot and move to the cloud faster, really to not just help them survive now but thrive in the long-term. Yeah, immediately when COVID hit and it hit at different times in different parts of the world, immediately when COVID hit, we saw the conversations that we were having, turning from, hey, what's my digital strategy to immediately, what are my digital capabilities? And what that really means is, what do I have the ability to do tomorrow because tomorrow is gonna really matter. I don't have necessarily the time to plan for the next several quarters or the next several years. What can I do tomorrow to really support my own workforce and support my own customers and the obligations I have as a financial institution? The first thing we saw people do was to try and make sure that those who make financial services work can work. You can look at the adoption of Amazon Workspaces as well as our Amazon Connect call centers of service as two examples there. The RBL Bank in India was able to move to Amazon Workspaces in just 10 days to enable its team to actually work remotely from home when they couldn't come into the office. You can look at Barclays. Barclays is actually a presenter at ReInvent this year. They'll have a session on how they use Amazon Connect, which again is our call center as a service offering to enable 25,000 contact center agents to work from home when they could no longer work out of their traditional contact center. The second thing we saw financial institutions doing was making sure that customer engagement could still be meaningful when digital was the only option. Specifically here in the US, you could look at the work that AWS did with fintech companies like Biz2X or Finzac or Bluevine, Stripe and Cabbage in support of the CARES Act in the US. You might remember that the CARES Act has some provisions for funding for small businesses. The Small Business Administration had a program called the Paycheck Protection Program. And those organizations were active in providing funding to small businesses through that program. I'll give you the example of Cabbage. Cabbage had previously not been an SBA lender, but they were able to in two weeks build a fully automated system for small businesses to access PPP funding using Amazon Textract to extract information from documentation that those folks submitted to get a loan. That reduced approval times for multiple days to about a meeting of four hours to actually get approval to get funding through the PPP program. And then just four months, Cabbage became the second largest PPP lender. They lent over $7 billion in funding, which was twice the amount of funding that they lent last year in 2019 loan. So we were happy to support organizations like Cabbage and those other FinTech companies as they help small businesses in the US get access to funding during this critical time. And as we know, as you said, critical time, but really life or death for a lot of businesses and as we continue to go through these waves. But it's interesting that you talked about the speed of facilitation that during such unprecedented times, AWS and this massive machine was able to continue moving at full speed ahead and helping those customers to pivot. You talked about the cloud connect. I had a conversation with a guest on theCUBE last week about that. And I now think about if I have to call in a contact center, that person might be from home. So we're fortunate that the cloud computing technology and people like you and AWS are able to power that because it's literally essential, which is probably one of the words of the year, but being able to keep the machinery going and innovate at the same time has been make or break for a lot of businesses. Absolutely. And you look at kind of one of the last areas that I'll point to is financial institutions and AWS were very much focused on making sure that systems that cannot fail that they scaled. And so you can look at the work we did with FINRA. FINRA is the primary capital market regulator here in the US. And on a daily basis, FINRA process is about 400 billion market events every night to do surveillance on our markets. Now, when COVID hit, we had unprecedented volumes and volatility in the market. And FINRA was looking at processing anywhere from two to three times their normal daily market volumes. That's anywhere from 800 billion market events to 1.2 trillion a night. And if you look at how they were able to scale they were actually able to scale up compute resources and AWS were on a nightly basis, they were able to automatically turn on and off up to 100,000 compute nodes in a single day. That automatic ability to scale is the power you're talking about being able to actually turn things up needed and turn things down when you don't need it based on the volumes. Well, and that's gonna be something key going forward as we know that there will be one thing I think that I always say we can count on right now is uncertainty and continued uncertainty. But we've also seen, I'm calling them COVID catalysts. What you talked about with cabbage for example and how that business pivoted quickly because of the power of cloud computing and emerging technologies. What are some of the things that you think as we go into 2021 in the financial services arena what are some of the big tech trends that you think were maybe born during COVID that are gonna be critical going forward? Well, you had Melanie Frank from Capital One on the cube a couple of days ago and she was talking about their shift to cloud and what that's really enabled. And she kind of sums it up nicely. She says, look, we wanna give our customers experience that are real time and that are intelligent. And you just can't do that with legacy technology that's sitting in kind of a legacy data center. And so I think that's gonna be kind of that the all-encompassing statement for what's happening in the financial services industry. And as I mentioned, organizations overnight said, okay, wait a minute, let's take that strategy and then let's put it aside. Let's talk about capabilities, what can we do? And I think necessity is the mother of invention. And when you're faced with limitations and challenges like we all have been faced with around the world and not just in the financial services industry it breeds invention and the desire and the need to actually meet those challenges head on in very intuitive ways. And I think you're gonna see more invention and specifically more invention from established players in the financial services industry. Cloud use is not just experimental on the edges anymore. You're gonna see more organizations coming out of COVID having had those experiences where they actually stood up a context and are in scale that in just a matter of a few days to thousands of agents. You're gonna find organizations say, wait a minute, we can do remote work because we have access to things like Amazon Workspaces. So I think you're gonna see that be a trend. I think you're also gonna see what Lori Beer said in the keynote with Andy. She made a very, very astute statement. And I don't know if people caught it because it was kind of in the middle of her conversation. She said, look, we're trying to infuse analytics into everything that we do at JPMorgan. And I think you're gonna see more and more financial institutions looking to do that to actually leverage the power of analytics to power everything to do as a financial institution. So I think those are a couple of things that you're gonna see. And then looking kind of around the corner I think you're gonna continue to see more reinvention within the industry. What I mean by that is you've seen many financial institutions over the last week with reinvent making announcements. You saw Bank of Utah saying, hey, look, we are completely transforming ourselves with AWS just a few weeks before you saw standard charter, the same thing. HSBC said the same thing. Global payments earlier in the year said the same thing. And you're gonna see more and more organizations coming out and talking about these strategic decisions to reinvent everything that they do to make the financial systems of the world work. And so we're very pleased to be part of those organizations to make those transformations possible. We're seeing a lot of invention within the industry and we're very pleased to be a part of the reinvention of the financial systems around the world. And it's interesting to hear that you see even the JPMorgan, some of those legacy big houses are going to be really pivoting. They have to be competitive and to be able to utilize analytics to deliver those real-time services. Because as we all know, as consumers, our patience is wearing thin these days. But I agree with you. I think there's a lot of opportunity there that innovation is exciting and there will have to be reinvention of entire industries. But I think there's a lot of silver linings there. Scott, I wish we had more time because I know we could keep talking. But thank you for sharing your insights on this reinvented reinvent this year. We appreciate it. Thank you, Lisa. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. Of course, Scott Lawlands. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS ReInvent 2020.