Invest in Trust: Takeaways from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Financial Services Industry Analyst Day and Summit, 2025

AWS hosted technology and industry analysts in New York City for two events on May 13 and 14: the AWS Financial Services Analyst Day and the Client Summit. The agenda captured several core tenets of our research into the governance, resilience and compliance innovations, as the theme of ‘trust’ in AWS innovations and partnerships emerged as a central topic throughout the client presentations. The following are a few notable takeaways:

Trust in accelerated cloud computing: transforming capital markets

Nasdaq and AWS discussed the progress of Nasdaq Eqlipse, a cloud-native service offering trading, clearing and settlement services; standardized market data; APIs and intelligence across the trade lifecycle. The Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) has recently migrated to the platform, with a rollout in the Nordics underway. The partnership between AWS and Nasdaq, powered by NVIDIA’s accelerated computing infrastructure, exemplifies the trust that established capital markets providers like Nasdaq (serving more than 95% of SIFIs today) now place in modern cloud infrastructure. This collaboration could serve as a new industry backbone, empowering emerging and regional exchanges (such as PSE) and leveling the playing field by providing access to resilient, efficient and scalable capital markets infrastructure.

Zero trust: a pathway to financial modernization with AWS

Citizens Bank and Prudential Financial have achieved significant modernization by moving to the AWS platform, leveraging zero trust cyber GRC (governance, risk and compliance) principles as a foundation. Supported by over 120 standard services in the AWS portfolio, these capabilities have become a de facto standard in financial modernization. They not only strengthen security and resilience but also de-risk and accelerate the transition to next-generation financial infrastructure.

Beyond shift left – Amazon Q empowers developers

DTCC shared its progress in deploying Amazon Q and Amazon Q for QuickSight, a generative AI-powered, GRC-oriented integrated development environment designed to accelerate and streamline code development. Currently, approximately 40% of the code produced by DTCC’s software engineers is generated using Amazon Q—a figure expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. Beyond efficiency gains, DTCC executives noted that engineers are now delivering higher-quality, more secure code, positioning them as a critical line of defense against business and operational disruptions, cyber threats and other risks.

Secure, reliable AI solutions for highly regulated industries

Anthropic also played a role in the financial modernization narrative at the event, providing secure, reliable and compliant AI infrastructure using Claude and other foundational models. These solutions operate in environments with stringent cyber and GRC requirements, such as AWS GovCloud and Amazon SageMaker for classified data, supporting global compliance standards. With a commitment never to train models using customer data, Anthropic demonstrates that even sectors with strict GRC demands can harness advanced AI capabilities to drive innovation while maintaining compliance and public trust.

AI-driven operational intelligence enhances decision-making and efficiency

Citi’s use of large language models (LLMs) is delivering operational efficiency, accuracy and compliance improvements in its domestic and cross-border trade and treasury finance businesses. The value proposition for better governance—spanning trade finance operations, client and counterparty interactions—includes faster turnaround times, reuse of standardized and approved text, and reliable audit trails within a single platform. LLMs and related automation give Citi more time and authority to govern their specialized LLM libraries, enrich prompt and retrieval phases, and enhance overall services and value to clients.

AI workflows and agentic models create tangible business value

NVIDIA had several spots in the agenda to showcase investments to accelerate agentic AI adoption through ‘accelerated compute’ and an AI Enterprise stack, including NVIDIA AI blueprints for virtual assistance, customer services, software security, data extraction and others. According to NVIDIA, the AI workflows in buy-side operations enabled by these innovations have generated substantial new capital markets value, exemplified by $2 billion in new value at JPMC and twice the trading volume at Jane Street, enabled by AWS services and GPU compute platforms. The deployment of agentic AI models for those seeking alpha appears to be no longer theoretical but instead is setting benchmarks for value creation.

Special thanks to Andrew Renzella, the AWS AR team and colleagues at AWS, NVIDIA, DTCC, Anthropic and others for their access and dialogue.