New Way Now: How Candescent and NTT DATA accelerated a complex banking divestiture by ~50%

Featured in this video:
Ralph Topete, Executive Director, SRE, Digital Banking, Candescent
Gaurav Goel, Sr. Director Enterprise Cloud, NTT DATA

Executive Summary: Candescent, a digital banking organization that serves 1,300 financial institutions and 30 million customers, faced a high-stakes divestiture from its parent company. To maintain business continuity and regulatory compliance, Candescent partnered with NTT DATA and Google Cloud to migrate its massive digital banking platform. Using Gemini and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform from Google Cloud together with NTT DATA’s cloud migration services, the team completed the carve-out in just nine months — significantly faster than the 16–24 month industry average. This modernization has already yielded a 20% reduction in cloud costs and established the foundation for a new era of intelligent banking.

Challenge: Candescent needed to extract multiple lines of business from a complex, long-standing parent environment into a standalone entity without a single second of downtime for its millions of users. The risks: a loss of uptime would directly impact customer trust, while any lapse in regulatory compliance during the separation could lead to significant sanctions. Candescent needed a partner and a platform that could provide 100% visibility into its cloud spend while maintaining a relentless pace of feature delivery during the transition.

Solution: Candescent partnered with Google Cloud for best-of-breed platform capabilities in data and AI, and NTT DATA for its deep bench of execution and regulatory expertise. The team used Gemini and Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to shift from manual maintenance to high-value innovation, specifically using AI accelerators to reveal three times more assets during the discovery phase than manual methods allowed. This structured execution approach, supported by NTT DATA’s migration expertise, enabled the team to run multiple workstreams in parallel, ensuring that security and compliance remained top-of-mind from the first day of the pilot to live production.

Result: The collaboration delivered an unprecedented timeline for a financial services carve-out: The teams completed the migration in nine months, nearly twice as fast as typical programs of this nature. Since the move, Candescent has seen a 15-20% reduction in cloud costs through proactive governance and enhanced visibility into workloads. On the technical side, AI-driven discovery increased asset visibility by 300%, effectively de-risking the entire migration. Most importantly, the transition was seamless for the 30 million end users, allowing Candescent to bypass digital parity and move directly into intelligent banking, where data and AI are used to provide personal, bespoke experiences for every customer.



Highlights and key takeaways from our interview with Ralph Topete and Gaurav Goel:

→ “The best part about it is we can use our data, we can use the expertise we already have in Google Cloud, and we can deliver those things to our customers and they can see real value instantly.” — Ralph Topete

→ “The tight coordination between NTT DATA, Candescent, and Google Cloud helped us to do a lot of work streams in parallel and meet these timelines.” — Guarav Goel

→ “The value of collaborating with Google Cloud and a partner like NTT is that they can bring a tremendous amount of knowledge immediately.” — Ralph Topete

Google Cloud products used: Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform

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