FICO is moving major services to the cloud, and that may mean good times ahead for lending startups.

The financial services firm announced its integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) during yesterday’s AWS Summit, making it one of several financial services companies now running (at least in significant part) on Amazon’s cloud service, including banks like DBS Bank and Capital One.

As established service providers move to the public cloud, the world opens up (and costs go down) for startups looking to leverage those services.

“For the solutions we had to deploy, we still had to build our automation in, and with automation that also meant we had to API-enable our infrastructure. And guess what, there’s a very very big player in that market, AWS, that just so happened to have very solid API-enabled infrastructure that meets most of our needs,” said Claus Moldt, chief information officer for FICO, regarding the decision to move to the public cloud.

FICO is already used by 90 out of 100 premium lenders, according to Moldt, but the move to the AWS cloud could lead to greater opportunities for lending startups to make use of FICO’s services.

Firstly, the move allows FICO greater speed, but more importantly, a greater global reach. The company has moved several key solutions to the cloud with AWS, including its myFICO subscription service (where users can subscribe for access to their scores from FICO clients) and its Decision Management Suite, or DMS, analytics platform.

DMS makes use of predictive analytics and optimization to provide a SaaS solution to its clients. FICO has made upgrades to the platform for the migration to AWS, which will allow for faster speed and more secure financial data.

“The platform, what we call DMS 2.0, it’s just been rolled out, and we’ve got our first customer in Australia,” said Moldt. “We didn’t have to build out a data center in that region, we used AWS which already has a presence there.”

Moldt is expecting a growth of customers in Australia thanks to this availability, especially as financial startups and institutions won’t have to go through the traditional compliance worries of using a public cloud service: AWS is already fully PCI-compliant, said Moldt.

“When we talk to our customers—I meet with a lot of CTOs, CIOs, especially in the financial industry—and I think historically they’ve been pretty hesitant to move to the public cloud,” said Moldt. “They were worried about the security aspects, they were worried about the compliance. I think there’s been a lot of progress made in those areas as part of what the public cloud delivers, specifically on AWS.”

Compliance is a headache for incumbent financial players, but if mismanaged at the beginning it can destroy lending startups. Assurance in this area, plus faster access to FICO solutions, could lead to healthy growth for quite a few lending startups around the globe.