Skip Potter, one of Capital One’s technology braintrust, is leaving the finance giant to become chief technology officer at Nike, Coins2Day has learned.
Potter, a veteran tech executive who spent five years at Capital One (COF), was most recently managing vice president of engineering for the Virginia-based company. Before that, he was vice president of technology innovation at Capital One, according to his LinkedIn (LNKD) profile. He also spent five years at BT before joining the bank.
Capital One had no comment for this story. Nike did not respond to requests for comment. Sources close to the move confirmed it, but requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on personnel matters.
Capital One has been one of the first major financial services firms to publicly acknowledge its use of shared public cloud technology for many purposes. Last fall, chief information officer Rob Alexander spoke at AWS Re:Invent about the bank’s use of Amazon Web Services for even critical “production workloads,” for example.
For more on financial services in the cloud, read: Yes, Banks Do Use Amazon’s Cloud
Because banks are so strictly regulated and consumer data needs to be so closely guarded, many financial institutions were wary of placing data or software applications onto what amounts to shared data center infrastructures run by someone else. That’s the public cloud model espoused by Amazon (AMZN) Web Services, Microsoft (MSFT) Azure, Google (GOOG) Cloud Platform, and others.
For more on Microsoft’s cloud watch:
To be fair, many of the too-big-to-fail financial institutions are using AWS or other cloud technologies, but haven’t exactly advertised that fact to date. That may change as these organizations get more comfortable with the technology and the big cloud providers push them to talk more about their experiences.
Nike (NKE), like Capital One, is an AWS customer, according to this AWS RE:invent talk by Wilf Russell, Nike’s consumer technology officer.