Grasshopper Bank is evaluating its cloud strategy and partnerships while keeping AI applications in mind.

The $867 million Grasshopper is 100% cloud-native and uses both Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, Luther Liang, director of product at the bank, told Bank Automation News. Managing data and applications becomes simpler when operations are on the cloud, he added. 

And as technology advances, banks are looking to their cloud providers for more services. 

Grasshopper is looking to migrate all its data and operations to Google Cloud and eliminate its use of AWS over time, Liang said. Google’s ability to provide AI tools along with its cloud services could be the main driver for the decision. 

“I really see the primary player in this space being Google,” Liang said. “I think they’ve done the best job of combining a lot of what they’re doing with Gemini [its gen I foundational model] with a lot of the cloud services.” 

Grasshopper sees fewer AI suite connections on AWS’ cloud platform, Liang said. 

Grasshopper is evaluating AI services in a holistic way to learn which provider can meet most of its AI needs as the company grows, Liang said. Thus the bank prefers Google for its services although ChatGPT from OpenAI might actually be a better foundational model, they said. 

Cloud is foundational to AI 

Before FIs decide to deploy AI, they must upgrade their infrastructure and migrate to the cloud, Dennis Gada, executive vice president and global head of banking and financial services at tech vendor Infosys, told BAN. 

“Unless the foundation is strong, there is only so much incremental value that you can get out of AI and gen AI,” Gada said. “It makes things a lot easier if you are working with a particular cloud provider to leverage their AI tools and solutions bundled into the cloud offerings to scale up the AI journey.” 

Similarly, SMB bank services fintech Bluevine similarly sees its cloud and AI journey as being closely tied together, Bluevine Chief Product Officer Herman Man told BAN, adding that Bluevine uses AWS for its cloud needs. 

Bluevine teamed up with Salesforce to deploy a chatbot to enhance its self-service capabilities, he said. Nearly 40% of its 40,000 customer queries a month are solved by its chatbot. 

Being cloud native also allows fintechs to easily work with multiple vendors to quickly roll out products, Man said

“With legacy systems these kinds of integrations are slow and cumbersome,” he said. 

Grasshopper Director of Engineering & Platforms Andrew Braun will be speaking at the upcoming Bank Automation Summit on the panel “The operational paradigm: Identifying and implementing internal efficiency initiatives.”  

Register here for Bank Automation Summit 2025, taking place March 3-4 in Nashville, Tenn. View the full event agenda here.