VIDEO: CIO Says Cap One Has Shifted to ‘100%’ Agile Software Development

At Capital One Financial Corp., the need for compressed IT production cycles has led to significant changes in the way the bank pursues its innovation projects, including changing the very teams that build them out, says the bank’s chief information officer, Robert Alexander. This is driven by the “7 to 8 million customers who only bank with us through digital channels” — “that has really changed how we think about IT,” Alexander says. Alexander explains that Cap One has been forced to find a different brand of IT talent, folks who can understand the digital dynamic in a way that “older folks” can’t.

Alexander says that this digital centrality at Cap One has led the company to completely shift to agile software development, which is essentially iterative and incremental development. Alexander says Capital One is now “100% agile development.”

Now, what might even be more interesting is the source of this video. It was posted last week by Andreessen Horowitz, the revolutionary venture capital firm. Senior banking executives have increasingly been feeding their inner creativity by doing Sand Hill Road circuits, and clearly this was one of Alexander’s.