Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making a concerted effort to convince financial services firms to deploy more workloads in the cloud.
The cloud service provider has recently revealed that S&P Global is providing integrations with Amazon Quick Suite, a set of artificial intelligence (AI) agents for automating workflows, that can now directly access S&P Global financial data sets via two instances of a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that has been jointly developed.
More ambitiously, BlackRock beginning in the second half of 2026 has committed to making its Aladdin investment management platform available on the AWS cloud. Aladdin is an IT platform managed by BlackRock that enables clients of the financial services company to manage processes spanning everything from building portfolios to accounting in a way that integrates third-party brokers, trading platforms, and data providers.
Originally launched in 2020 and deployed on the Microsoft Azure cloud, BlackRock next year plans to provide clients with the option of deploying Aladdin on AWS. As part of that agreement, Amazon Treasury, the arm of the AWS parent organization that oversees company investments, will be among the first adopters of Aladdin running on AWS.
The alliance with BlackRock is part of a larger push to convince providers of financial services to rely more on cloud services provided by AWS, says Scott Mullins, managing director of worldwide financial services at AWS.
Additionally, financial services firms that partner with AWS will be able to take advantage of AI capabilities provided by AWS to more effectively combat fraud, he added. “AI will make it easier to surface suspicious activity,” says Mullins.
Financial services firms have historically never lacked the resources required to build and maintain their own data centers. AWS and other cloud service providers in the age of AI, however, are making a renewed effort to convince these firms to move more workloads to the cloud as the cost of IT infrastructure steadily rises. In many cases, the data centers the financial services firms currently maintain are rapidly becoming obsolete in an era where more applications require access to graphical processor units (GPUs) and AI accelerators.
It’s not clear at what pace, or for that matter how many, financial services firms are shifting workloads to the cloud but the one thing that is certain is the total cost of IT is rising. Smaller fintech startup companies especially are not going to have the resources required to build and maintain their own AI data centers. It’s also apparent that even larger firms are revisiting their cloud strategies even if only to gain access scarce GPUs to train AI models and deploy inference servers.
The financial services sector has, of course, always been at the forefront of adoption of emerging technologies. The issue now is determining how quickly they can gain access to emerging technologies that are crucial to maintaining their competitive edge at a time when every other vertical industry sector now has similar ambitions.
