3 ways Capital One inspires innovation

At Capital One, there’s no innovation without collaboration. Our associates work together to meet the challenges of an ever-changing digital landscape, from building machine learning to help fight fraud to creating new software to manage data in the cloud. And their innovations are changing what it means to be a bank.

Take a look at their cutting-edge work below.

Solving data management with Slingshot

Salim Syed, vice president and head of data engineering, recognized the potential of the cloud at Capital One early on. Beginning in 2016, Salim guided his team as they built new data infrastructures and migrated trillions of bytes of data onto the cloud.

While there are many benefits of moving to the cloud—like instantly scalable computing resources and near-unlimited storage—Capital One also faced some common obstacles managing our data, infrastructure and costs in our years-long data journey to operate in the cloud. With a lack of tools in the market that could help us meet our goals, our team of talented engineers began creating internal tools to promote agility, ease of use, and self-service for Snowflake users across the company. Now we’re leveraging the data and cloud management expertise we developed to help other businesses using Snowflake overcome those hurdles with Slingshot: the first solution from Capital One Software.

And it all wouldn’t be possible without our associates embracing a culture of innovation.

“Capital One Software is really a unique place to be in,” Salim said. “The amount of love, ownership, and passion every associate brings is just mind-boggling. It’s a great culture to come into. I’m lucky just to be a part of this.”

Launching early paycheck

Capital One associates made payday a little more exciting by helping customers get their paycheck up to two days early. In March 2021, Josh, a senior manager of software engineering, led the release of early paycheck, offering all Capital One customers their direct deposit paycheck up to two days early.

Disrupting the established direct deposit process and becoming the first national bank to offer this service was no easy task.

“Reimagining long-established banking processes meant that we had to launch an innovative technical solution while addressing customer concerns,” Josh said. “Without help from other parts of our business, early paycheck never would have become a reality.”

Josh and his team collaborated with multiple teams to make early paycheck happen. As they worked on building the software for early paycheck, they relied on legal and compliance experts to provide information and answer crucial questions. After early paycheck launched in 2021, Josh and his team saw immediate positive feedback from customers as they achieved more financial freedom. The national advertising campaign made sure that Capital One customers were able to use early paycheck for more financial freedom.

“All of us who helped shape early paycheck feel a deep sense of pride for the impact their work has had on our customers,” Josh said.

Using machine learning to fight fraud

Vannia, a machine learning engineer manager on the Data Insights team, was first approached by the card fraud team to create a forward-thinking solution to help mitigate emerging fraud trends. As fintech advanced, scammers were becoming more sophisticated in their schemes. Vannia wasn’t going to let them win.

Vannia and her team expanded Capital One’s fraud detection system to help people protect their finances. By collaborating with card fraud and engineering teams, they developed a tool that helps detect anomalies in credit card transaction data and automatically crafts defenses which help protect customers from credit card fraud and mistaken declines.

“Capital One gives you the opportunity to work on innovative problems from multiple perspectives and applying cutting-edge technology,” Vannia said. “If there are similarities on something that we're working on, instead of duplicating efforts, we join efforts and try to build a better solution together.”