Leaders explore the limits of what’s possible at the AWS Financial Services Symposium 2025

Scott Mullins, Managing Director, AWS for Financial Services

Over 750 financial services leaders convened for the AWS Financial Services Symposium in New York City last month to share, build relationships, and explore how their peers are leveraging cloud technology to tackle their most pressing business challenges.

Under the theme “Pushing the Envelope,” the Symposium featured a rich lineup of presentations and discussions. Leaders from Coinbase, Nasdaq, S&P Global and more shared how they’re innovating with AWS to drive growth, enhance customer experiences, and transform their operations. Highlights included deep dives into agentic and generative AI and its applications in financial services, as well as sessions on modernization strategies, risk management, and regulatory compliance from industry pioneers who are reshaping the future of financial services.

AWS leaders, including Byron Cook, a Vice President and Distinguished Scientist focused on automated reasoning at AWS, and John Kain, Head of Financial Services Market Development for AWS, provided insight into the latest generative AI developments.

Scott Mullins, Managing Director, AWS for Financial Services, kicked off the event with his keynote, which framed how AWS customers are “pushing the limits of what’s possible,” moving beyond legacy technology through exploration and determination—with generative AI increasingly at the forefront.

“In financial services today, we don’t build the way we used to. We don’t serve customers in the ways that we used to. And we don’t run critical systems the way that we used to,” said Mullins. “We’ve moved beyond the limitations of legacy technology through exploration and determination. We’re helping our customers turn ideas that once seemed far-fetched into concrete actions that matter to financial consumers and businesses. And most importantly, we’re challenging norms on what is possible in how teams operate, and how they identify, manage, and mitigate risk.”

This blog provides a highlight reel from the event, and we invite you to dive deeper with on-demand access to the program.

Maturing approaches to foundation models and generative AI

As Mullins explained in his keynote, financial services organizations are evolving in their generative AI journeys. The financial services industry, like many others, started with an internal focus—boosting employee productivity. As confidence and capabilities have grown, many institutions are now exploring use cases centered on value creation and business growth.

AI agents are emerging as a transformative force in financial services, with AWS recently forming a dedicated agentic AI group to accelerate innovation in this space. These AI agents think iteratively and execute complex workflows, helping to reinvent core services like lending, underwriting, and claims processing. Organizations are using these capabilities to accelerate technology modernization, perform advanced research, identify novel investment opportunities, and develop deeply customized products and services.

As Cook pointed out in his session on Automated Reasoning, it’s not a journey free of obstacles or detours. Recent studies and anecdotal reports from the industry indicate that foundation models and generative AI are starting to approach the “trough of disillusionment” in Gartner’s Hype Cycle for AI, as organizations seek reliable solutions for enterprise use.

AWS is addressing these challenges by combining generative AI with automated reasoning. Cook highlighted how AWS has now integrated automated reasoning into its generative AI offerings through automated reasoning checks in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails. This approach, also known as symbolic AI or formal verification, provides mathematical, logic-based verification to ensure outputs align with known facts rather than hallucinations. This is particularly crucial for regulated industries where precision is essential.

Through Automated Reasoning checks in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, organizations can transform their compliance policies and regulatory requirements into a mathematical format, enabling verification of AI outputs with complete certainty.

Driving sustained, repeatable business value with gen AI

The real promise of generative AI is its power as a force multiplier that transforms operations, service delivery, and even product creation. This was the focus of the symposium’s first panel, “How Executives Gain Advantage with Generative AI.”

Kain, the panel’s moderator, emphasized that successful generative AI adoption isn’t about isolated applications, but building enterprise-wide capabilities that drive sustained business value. The panel shared diverse approaches to achieving this goal through Centers of Excellence (COEs). Approaches covered included starting with a focused group before expanding, building a hub-and-spoke model that provides templated solutions across the organization, and focusing on consistent use case evaluation and ethical AI implementation. Panelists discussed strategies for keeping pace with rapid AI advancements, highlighting the importance of aligning new technologies with specific business outcomes and creating flexible platforms to integrate and evaluate emerging capabilities.

The generative AI dialogue continued in the partner breakout sessions, featuring:

• “AI and GenAI in Financial Services: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Turns Ambition into Reality”
• “AI-First Banking: Led by NVIDIA and featuring Citizens and Infosys”
• “Lincoln Financial and Deloitte: Transforming financial services with Gen AI”

The program featured three transformative focus areas, with industry leaders sharing their success stories about turning ambitious visions into reality.

• Reimagining modernization – Financial services organizations—including Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), The Clearing House, Convera, and Moody’s—shared how they’re leveraging AWS to modernize legacy systems. From automating IT infrastructure and enhancing credit card processing to optimizing investment analysis and revolutionizing payments with blockchain technology, these organizations demonstrate how modernization is transforming the engines that collectively run the financial system to improve availability, reliability, resiliency, and security.
• Enhancing customer experience – Enterprises—such as Ally Financial, Coinbase, Empower, Galileo Financial Technologies, and Parameta—explained how they’re breaking traditional barriers in customer engagement. Their innovations span from secure tokenized payments and intelligent chatbots to AI-powered communication, automated feedback analysis, and streamlined claims processing—all focused on moving beyond personalization to preference, priority, and personal characteristics.
• Driving business growth – Leading organizations, including FIS Global, discussed how they’re harnessing AWS technology to push beyond traditional approaches. Their innovations include building advanced investment research platforms, streamlining loan processing, enhancing research efficiency with AI agents, and boosting client conversion through digital assistants.

The conversation continues beyond the Symposium through our on-demand content. We hope to see you at these upcoming learning and networking events:

• AWS London Symposium, June 25
• AWS Summit New York City, July 16
• re:Invent, December 1 – 5