Leveraging a Cloud Transformation to Increase Ally Financial’s Speed to Market Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2025

Ally’s move to the cloud has been years in the making. Our comprehensive cloud strategy is at the heart of our infrastructure modernization, helping the nation’s largest all-digital bank embrace the future of digital banking. Ally offers 11 million customers a suite of financial services – including checking, savings, investments, and auto loans.

It started with a vision for what tech at digital banking could be – simpler, always-on, resilient, customer-centric, scalable and flexible. To make that a reality, Ally’s technology organization embarked on a 10-year, multi-million-dollar project to exit the traditional mainframe in favor of a dynamic and nimble cloud solution, culminating with switching off the mainframe in March 2024.

Today, Ally is among the best in the industry for customer service and experience. The hybrid cloud strategy and functionality is the behind-the-scenes foundation – the superhero doing a lot of heavy lifting – of Ally’s award-winning digital bank.

Though reliable, mainframe technology was creating challenges for Ally to run its fast-paced, evolving business. Sunsetting a 30-year-old mainframe is a complex, multi-phased project for any company, but especially for a bank. Every financial institution has a core platform where it keeps its records – usually on a server in a data center. Banking has lagged other industries when it comes to cloud technology adoption given the priority of customers’ access to their money and potential risks complicating that access. Over the past decade, Ally has chipped away at the mainframe move – first moving its auto loans process over to a new cloud server and creating any new processes on the cloud – which helped Ally move quickly to service auto loans, collections and support underwriting.

Ally then moved retail and commercial banking to the public cloud, finally shedding old-fashioned processes and technology in favor of a more flexible hybrid cloud model. AWS and Microsoft were key partners in what is now a hardened network and cloud infrastructure that can support rapid growth of Ally’s business while also easing the burden of downtime. The final step was to migrate the legacy data and archive solution to the cloud and exit the mainframe, making Ally one of a few banks to achieve this milestone.

Strong partnership between senior business and technology leaders was critical, underscored by sponsorship from Ally’s CEO, Executive Council and Board of Directors, who were all unwavering in their support. Leaders involved were dedicated to the project for its duration and empowered through streamlined decision making, reporting to a decisive Steering Group that included Ally’s CEO.

The larger project team, about 500 teammates at its peak, was supported by a core group of senior business, technology and accounting leaders in one office to integrate structure, enable collaboration and share accountability. More than 5,000 Ally employees were impacted by this project, and positive stakeholder engagement helped create cohesion, with process-design decisions, regular updates and buy-in on Go/No-go criteria.

This was a feat of massive proportions. By the end of March, the project team had accomplished the following: • Integrated 72 systems • Implemented 1,770 process controls • Mapped 5,000 GL codes • Developed 297 batch and 106 real-time interfaces • Built 1,556 components • Executed 709 performance tests • Migrated 4.6 million accounts • Migrated $120+ billion in portfolios • Trained 5,100 employees • Delivered 120 business processes

Looking forward, this hybrid approach gives us enhanced flexibility and automation opportunities throughout our digital ecosystem, like quickly scaling capacity to align with business needs, updating and modernizing our apps faster, and offering a consolidated, customer-centric digital experience. We now have the capability to run hundreds of apps via a cloud structure that fits our needs and can be adjusted quickly to the needs of the business.

Ally’s move off the mainframe and its hybrid cloud transformation brought with it several benefits that support Ally’s business: • Agility: Modern, cloud-based or distributed systems enable faster deployments – including 4x faster speed-to-market for new products – better scalability, and greater adaptability to changing customer needs. • Cost Efficiency: Mainframes are notoriously expensive to maintain. Exiting Ally’s mainframe eliminates ~$9 million in annual operating costs, demonstrating the commitment to optimizing spending and reallocating resources toward innovation. • Security and Compliance: Moving off the mainframe allows Ally to leverage the latest advancements in cybersecurity and compliance tools, critical in today’s regulatory landscape. • Future-Proofing: By migrating to modern technology, Ally is positioning itself for long-term growth, with a 50% to 75% reduction in cost to deliver new capabilities, ensuring it can seamlessly adopt emerging technologies like AI, machine learning, and real-time data processing. • Cultural Shift: Exiting the mainframe and working toward Ally’s Cloud 2.0 strategy is more than a tech transformation – it’s a signal of the bank’s dedication to innovation, agility, and staying ahead in an increasingly digital financial ecosystem.