 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 re-invent 2020. I'm your host, John Furrier, you're here for three weeks with theCUBE virtual this year. We're not in person, we're doing remotes because of the pandemic. Got a great guest, Ricardo Guerra, CIO at ITAU Unibanko in Brazil. Great customer of Amazon. Really a good reference point to this transformation story that Andy Jassy has been talking about on stage. Ricardo, great to have you on remotely. Thanks for coming on from Brazil. Thank you, thanks for having me. Love to get down there, land the beach for a while, just relax after all the virtual tension from re-invent all the coverage has been wild. Anyway, thanks for coming on. I want to get into a CIO. You know, one of the things that Andy Jassy was really leaning forward this year on was the story of you got to be on the cloud to have agility in the digital transformation, which has been talked about for years. People, process, technology, we've heard that. This year more than ever, it's been quite the acceleration. You're either on the right side of history or not here as a business. Can you share your story of your transformation with Amazon? Sure, John. So this story months back to actually a decade ago when we started discussing our digital transformation, right? So when we see Taú, we are a bank that is almost 100 years old, 96 years old. And we are a big one. We have only in Brazil, 56 million customers. So it's a big company. And we have pretty much all the businesses of our universal bank, including insurance here in Brazil, banks also have insurance and all the rest. So from corporate banking to retail, from credit cards to investments, all sort of products. And we started in technology as early as it is in the 70s. So 1973 to be exactly when we started our current account system in the mainframe, right? So you can imagine that we have invested a lot in technology over the last almost 50 years. And it's always very well known here in the country for the use of technology. So we have been pioneers in online transfer in the 80s. We have been pioneers using ATMs and internet banking and so on. But what happened until 2010 is that we were pretty much putting up applications on top of the other. So we were offering products and services as fast as we could, looking at the customer, trying to differentiate ourselves from competition. But definitely we were trying to move as fast as we could but we were not taking the right care of the platform. In the sense that today we see a lot of transformation in technology happening all the time, right? There's new stuff coming out all the time. We're seeing here in re-invent, the amount of things that AWS have launched. So all the time we're seeing new stuff which is good for the business. So the speed of this transformation is only getting faster and faster. So in order to use all of those features, to be able to leverage on new technology, your platform has to be flexible. You have to be able to adopt those new technologies without losing moment of offering new products and services, right? So again, a decade ago we started discussing this and we said we have to invest in technology in a different way. It's not only producing solutions in financial services but definitely we have to take care of the platform and understand how we should evolve the platform in order to, again, better offer products and services to our customers, which is by the end of the day, it's why we exist. So we started this story and we said, okay, so there's three things mainly that we have to take care in order to go into this journey. First of all, it's about people. We have to have a new mindset, a new culture, a mindset where we empower people in decisions, we have people thinking about the customer all the time and being aggressive on building solutions for them and using technology for building those solutions, right? So we need more sort of an entrepreneur type of people and people who really want to differentiate themselves and provide better services to the customer. In a second pillar, I would say the methodology has to change, right? You have to have an agile methodology and agile approach as opposed to a traditional waterfall approach with silos internally in the organization. That allows you to be faster as well and to adapt to customer needs faster. And third of all, which is the main subject here in our conversation, you have to have a flexible platform as I was explaining. And so we decided to pretty much rewrite our application in an architecture where we can be flexible. So pretty much what we have is sort of a monolith where we write code, we have written code in a sequence building huge applications, right? And those huge applications are bottlenecks and they are very hard to maintain and to evolve. What we're doing is in a simple way, building microservices. We're breaking up those applications so we can adapt faster to whatever we see that our customers need or there's any business opportunity. In that sense, cloud is the perfect platform to host those services, right? Because we have, again, we're able to have DevOps methodology, we're able to have service reliable engineering, a site reliable engineering, we're able to have all kinds of things and services that will help us on this journey to be more flexible and faster, right? So that's why we have chosen to go to the cloud. In that sense, we've looked for a partner that was reliable, that was a leader in the market, that was able to keep up with all the technology that is coming out of the market and offer innovation in the level that we need. And that's the reason why we've partnered up with AWS for the next 10 years. So that's gonna be a good journey for us. Are you happy with Amazon just while I got you there? Are you happy with their response to you and their interfacing with you guys? Are you happy with them? Yes, yes, John. We have started working with AWS more intensely back in 2018 when our central bank allowed us to go to the public cloud. So we started working with them and we learned a lot, of course, we were very young and immature at the time in the knowledge of the technology. So we learned a lot in this two years and a half and we have built nice stuff together. We have a very important core systems running on AWS already and they have been a good partner. What they like to say is that our cultures match. We are both customer centrics. We are both concerned with the success of the partnership. A long-term partnership doesn't work if you're not concerned with the relationship. You gotta make sure that both parts will profit from this. So I think we have had a good match and in terms of technology, we are very happy. We have all the infrastructure and services that we need. Yeah, when you're building a bridge to the future together in relationships matter, I would agree and I think that's a differentiator. I want to just touch upon, you mentioned you guys were pioneers going back and the way you tell your story. I was growing up in the 70s and kind of cut my teeth in the 80s in computer science and remember those days? It was a very cool time. Went from mainframe client server, but there's a point where you become bloated with the monolithic. You're stuck with all this, we used to call it spaghetti code, right? It's all over the place, right? So, and all intertwined. Then you have that moment of truth. That's something that Andy Jassy was saying on stage, I thought was interesting and it was almost like a business school lesson of, hey leaders, you gotta get to the truth. When you guys saw the cloud, what was the mindset? Because it sounds like you guys are a pioneer in culture. You like to be innovative. What was the moment? Take me through the mindset of, hey, we've got to get busy building or we're going to get busy dying. What's the, take me through that mindset at that time. Sure, very good question, John. So we literally started to suffer with our own speed to be really transparent, right? We were seeing the market starting to speed up all these new startups and tech companies in other industries and we're seeing all the industries moving faster and everyone building solutions that were way better to the customer than the solutions that we were seeing, I don't know, five or 10 years before. And it doesn't matter if you're talking about any industry, not only finance, right? So we said, okay, looks like the financial industry is going to go through the same path. And we're trying to make things more, more, I would say towards the customer and we're trying to understand customer needs better. And we actually did that. We have implemented a design thinking methodology back in 2010, a big one at the bank. And we came up with a lot of solutions building along with the customer and we were piling up backlogs, right? And we were saying, okay, there's lots of stuff that we have to do. We're lost in our spaghetti. That's pretty much it, right? So that's when we saw, okay, that's the Andy Jesse moment that you described. Stop, we have to have a better platform. We have to reorganize ourselves. Otherwise we're gonna get lost in ourselves. There's no way we can grow and invest more because we're gonna get stuck in the spaghetti anyway. So we structured a very robust program of platform modernization where we have invested over the last few years mainly and we're gonna keep on investing looking ahead where we try to build solutions while modernizing our platform. So there's no, from our perspective, our platform is big enough to say that we cannot just rebuild the platform. Let's put a team aside and let's rebuild the bank. That would take seven, eight, nine years. I don't know how long. And then we would be legacy again whenever we're finished. So what do we do is we break up our reasoning. So we say, let's take each business as a very small component of the bank and let's build the technological components that support that business and let's extract those components from the monolith, from the legacy. And that's a strategy, that's a technology strategy that we have today. So we have empowered the business for them to own the platform. So they understand today that the platform is not a problem of technology but it's actually the business. And by owning the platform, they understand that the monolith doesn't allow them to be as fast as they want as the customer want. So it's very straightforward for them to understand that they have to break up that platform. 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 after that. You put it on them. They have to own the business model of the platform because there the keys to the kingdom are in their hands. You're enabling that. That's a great strategy. I love the micro-strategy breakout, picking things out rather than trying to boil the ocean over over seven years. That's a big mistake people make and they end up having a legacy outdated platform that's ready for no one, right? Ricardo, that's a masterclass right there in strategy. Thank you very much for sharing that insight into your bank and congratulations and all your innovations continues. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much. Okay, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE Virtual. We're remote this year. Got great content. Stay with us on theCUBE channel here on AWS Reinvent. Thanks for watching.