Financial services firms are trying to move faster, scale smarter, and ditch decades of legacy tech—but many still feel stuck in 2004. HCLTech and Amazon Web Services (AWS) think they can help. The two companies have signed a new strategic collaboration agreement aimed at accelerating AI-driven transformation across banking, wealth management, and insurance.
In an industry where every vendor claims “innovation,” this partnership matters because it blends HCLTech’s consulting-heavy domain expertise with AWS’s cloud and AI backbone. The target outcome: more autonomous financial services systems—contact centers that self-optimize, digital platforms that adapt in real time, and core systems that evolve without ballooning IT teams.
It’s a familiar ambition across the sector. What’s different now is the speed at which AI is becoming mandatory, not optional.
The Problem: Legacy Tech Meets Modern Expectations
When Srinivasan Seshadri—Chief Growth Officer and Global Head of Financial Services at HCLTech—describes the challenges clients face, none of it is shocking: siloed data, regulatory complexity, legacy platforms, costly integrations, sustainability pressure, and customer expectations shaped by Big Tech, not big banks.
These hurdles are precisely why many financial institutions have been slow to adopt true AI-driven automation. You can’t build autonomy on top of outdated plumbing.
The HCLTech–AWS collaboration aims to bypass that bottleneck.
What’s Being Built: Pre-Built AI-Driven Solutions for FSI
HCLTech is launching a suite of industry-compliant, pre-built solutions designed to plug directly into banking, wealth, and insurance ecosystems. Think less bespoke multi-year transformations and more modular acceleration kits.
Key offerings include:
- Modernized AI-powered contact centers
Automated routing, personalized interactions, and sentiment-aware support powered by AWS services. - Enhanced digital engagement tools
Targeted for banks and wealth platforms looking to deliver high-touch digital experiences without rearchitecting everything. - Core platform streamlining
From onboarding to underwriting to servicing, HCLTech promises cleaner workflows, faster updates, and scalable architectures. - Strategic consulting for institutional clients
Particularly in wealth and banking, where two new AWS-powered solutions are planned to guide firms toward autonomous operations.
These are not just software accelerators—they’re compliance-aware, industry-specific building blocks designed to shorten time-to-value. In a sector where cycles can run multiple years, that’s a differentiator.
Why AWS Brings the Competitive Edge
AWS has spent years building cloud patterns, compliance frameworks, and AI tools specifically for financial services. That includes secure data lakes, governance engines, industry-grade encryption, and more recently, its generative AI and analytics stack.
Scott Mullins, AWS’s Managing Director for Worldwide Financial Services, framed the partnership as a blend of “deep financial services expertise” and “scalable cloud infrastructure.” Translated: AWS provides the rails; HCLTech provides the operators.
The collaboration also reinforces a market trend: major consultancies and cloud providers are forming tighter alliances to deliver industry-ready AI solutions at scale. Accenture/AWS, Deloitte/Google Cloud, and Infosys/Microsoft all represent similar alliances. For HCLTech, this partnership positions it squarely among those top-tier ecosystem plays.
A Client View: Agility—and Real Transformation?
Jefferies CIO Vikram Dewan offered one of the more revealing comments in the announcement:
“Our collaboration with HCLTech and AWS is driving new levels of agility and innovation, helping us modernize core financial platforms and unlock the full potential of cloud and AI.”
Agility is one of the holy grails of financial modernization. For decades, core systems—often stitched together through mergers, mainframes, and custom code—have slowed modernization efforts to a crawl.
If the HCLTech–AWS solutions genuinely inject more agility without compromising compliance, that’s a competitive advantage every major financial institution will want.
Autonomous Financial Services: The Next Big Frontier
Both companies point to a future where financial platforms largely run themselves: automated workflows, self-healing systems, intelligent underwriting, real-time risk models, and predictive operational scaling.
Many firms are experimenting with autonomous operations, but lack:
- clean data pipelines
- compliance-ready automation
- cross-system integration
- AI expertise
- the right cloud architecture
This collaboration seeks to fill those gaps with factory-built solutions that reduce reliance on custom engineering.
It’s also a direct response to the rising expectations of regulators, who now routinely ask not just whether systems are modern—but whether they are resilient, explainable, and future-proof.
Strengthening a Long-Standing Alliance
This isn’t the first time HCLTech and AWS have worked together—but it is one of their most targeted collaborations to date. Their previous joint efforts focused more broadly on cloud migration and digital transformation. The new agreement shifts the focus toward AI-powered industry depth, tailored specifically for the financial sector’s pain points.
The timing makes sense. As generative AI matures and fits more naturally into regulated workflows, financial institutions are no longer experimenting—they’re operationalizing.
And they’re looking for ready-made, regulatory-safe paths to do it.
The Bottom Line: A High-Impact Alliance for an Industry Under Pressure
The financial services industry is in one of the most significant modernization cycles in its history. Core platforms are being overhauled. Legacy tech is giving way to cloud-native systems. AI isn’t a proof-of-concept anymore—it’s becoming a core competency.
HCLTech and AWS are positioning themselves as strategic partners who can help financial institutions move faster toward that autonomous future. Whether this collaboration becomes a template for large-scale AI modernization across the sector will depend on execution—but the foundations are strong.
For financial institutions juggling cost pressures, regulatory mandates, and rising customer expectations, a pre-built, compliance-ready, AI-powered solution stack may be exactly the kind of modernization shortcut they’ve been waiting for.
