Bank of America's CTO, who played a key part in a private-cloud strategy execs praised for saving billions, has left the bank

Bank of America

Howard Boville, chief technology officer at Bank of America

• Bank of America's chief technology officer has left the firm, a person familiar with the situation confirmed to Business Insider.
• Howard Boville had been with bank since 2012 and helped lead Bank of America's seven-year project of moving 80% of its infrastructure to a private cloud.
• Boville's responsibilities as CTO will now be split between Bank of America's global banking and markets and consumer, small business, and wealth management tech teams.
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Howard Boville, Bank of America's chief technology officer who played a key role the bank's private cloud strategy, left the firm in February, Business Insider has learned.

Boville, who joined Bank of America in 2012, helped lead the bank's vision of transitioning to a private cloud, which it kicked off in 2013.

The project, which lasted seven years and culminated in 80% of the bank's infrastructure residing on its internal cloud, helped save $2.1 billion in infrastructure costs in 2019, Boville had previously told Business Insider.

A person directly familiar with the situation confirmed that Boville no longer worked at the bank, and said that no replacement would be named. Boville could not immediately be reached for comment.

Boville's responsibilities are being split between the bank's global banking and markets and consumer, small business, and wealth management tech teams.

As much of Wall Street had started shifting more workloads onto public cloud providers, Bank of America remained an outlier at the time with its decision to build out its own private cloud. The strategy was originally established by David Reilly, the bank's chief technology officer at the time who currently serves as the chief information officer of its global banking and markets team.

In June 2019, Boville explained to Business Insider the rationale behind the decision to stay the course with its private cloud as others looked to work with public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

"We're just waiting for the value play for our shareholders to kick in and allow us to do that," Boville said at the time. "There needs to be a neighborhood we want to live in at the right economics."

It wouldn't take long for the value proposition to change. In November 2019, IBM announced it was launching a Wall Street-focused public cloud. The product had been built out with the help of Bank of America, which would be one of its initial customers.

The bank had worked with the tech giant for 18 months to develop the public cloud to the specifications required of a financial firm.

"There will always be a need for our private cloud," Boville said at the time. "But we don't believe all the applications that we currently have need to sit within our own physical data centers and our own physical hardware."

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at ddefrancesco@businessinsider.com, Signal (646-768-1650) or direct message on Twitter @dandefrancesco.

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