Brazil's Itaú to decommission legacy workloads following cloud move

Itaú, Brazil’s largest private sector bank, will start decommissioning its legacy structure after its migration to the cloud, according to CEO Milton Maluhy Filho.

The bank has already modernized and digitized 70% of its workloads, with 100% of its main data now in the cloud.

“We're really advanced in this process. This last step remains to be completed to be able to decommission, which is the technical term, our legacy system, the mainframe,” Filho said in reply to BNamericas during a press talk at the Febraban Tech event in São Paulo.

Asked if the bank is considering shutting down its datacenter, the CEO said that the idea is to “change the logic” of the facility, which should be maintained for redundancy and contingency purposes.

The modernization project is expected to be completed in the next two years, after which the decommissioning could advance, he said.

Itaú has been investing for the past five years in its cloud and digital transformation project, for which AWS is its main tech partner.

A 10-year contract with AWS was signed in December 2020, but the bank also relies on Microsoft Azure for certain workloads and platforms, and especially for artificial intelligence (AI).

“We want to go to the cloud, primarily to gain agility, speed and above all to enhance generative AI,” said Filho.

According to the executive, Itaú is the world's third biggest user of GitHub, the OpenAI/Microsoft platform integrated with the Co-Pilot tool. 

At Itaú, around 17,000 people currently work with the platform and over 22,000 people work with data in general, said the executive.

At the end of Q1, Itaú had over 1,800 planned initiatives related to reviewing, streamlining and optimizing processes, automating business activities, and using data and analytics.

Another 1,600 initiatives were reportedly being implemented, related to automation, cost reduction, digital processing and cloud migration, among others

Specifically in AI, Itaú has around 250 internal projects under development, said Filho. Coding, credit analysis and customer relationshio are the main fronts on which it is working.

“AI is a means, not an end. It’s about how we create value, simplify processes for customers, seek efficiency for better prices,” he said at the opening of the Febraban event. “The user is digital and doesn’t compare you with bank A or B anymore. He compares you with Netflix, with Spotify.”

In Q1, Itaú invested 600mn reais (US$110mn) in business and technology, twice as much as in the first three months of last year.

For full-year 2023, capex was 3.1bn reais for business and technology, up from 2.9bn reais in 2022.