Financial firms crave the many benefits of moving to the cloud, but it’s a difficult, slow, and expensive process. Google Cloud and Santander are betting that big institutions will buy battle-tested software that makes the transition easier.  

Nine in 10 financial institutions are working on their digital transformation, but the process of migrating applications to the cloud in a systematic, secure way can be daunting.  

To that end, Google Cloud just launched a mainframe migration service built on top of technology that Banco Santander created to help it digitize its core banking. The software, which Santander dubbed Gravity, allows parallel processing, where workloads run on both existing mainframes and on the cloud at the same time. This lets Banco Santander perform real-time testing for stability and performance before officially transitioning.  

Through this partnership, other large firms will now be able to buy a version of the software through Google to help them complete their own cloud migrations. 

The alliance gives Banco Santander a way to externalize a product it developed in-house and will also accelerate its digital transformation. Capital One made a similar move earlier this year when it started selling Slingshot, a software product it originally created to manage its own use of the cloud data tool Snowflake.  

This partnership will also help Google appeal to other big financial services customers (it currently counts Wells Fargo and BNY Mellon among its clients).