Capital One continues to expand its technology presence in the Greater Toronto Area. What makes Canada and specifically the GTA such a strategic destination for technology investment and talent development?
Damjan Pelemis: Canada has a thriving tech ecosystem, supported by strong universities and a highly skilled talent pool. The GTA, in particular, combines the scale, infrastructure, and community of a premier North American tech hub.
For Capital One, technology is central to our business strategy and, as we grow our Canadian talent footprint, we’re doing more than just hiring—we’re building a team that defines how we deliver real-time intelligent customer experiences and innovative new financial services that benefit millions of customers. Toronto is the natural home for that work.
Many global technology companies are increasing their footprint in Toronto. From your perspective, what differentiates Canada’s tech ecosystem today, and why is it attracting so much attention from organizations like Capital One?
Damjan Pelemis: Toronto is no longer just a strong local talent market; it’s a globally relevant tech hub with the density, ambition, and expertise to drive enterprise-scale innovation. We’ve had a team in Canada for 30 years and our growth is accelerating.
Our Canadian tech team works collaboratively with colleagues across North America by creating in-house, modern platforms that solve challenging industry problems and build innovative new products and experiences that make a real difference in our customers’ lives globally.
Capital One often describes itself as a technology company that happens to be in banking. How has your cloud-first transformation changed the way you build products, innovate, and serve more than 100 million customers?
Damjan Pelemis: Technology is the engine behind our mission to change banking for good. We leverage data-driven underwriting to lower operational costs, mitigate risk, and extend coverage to Canadians who might not qualify at other banks. Over the last decade, we fundamentally transformed our infrastructure by modernizing software development, adopting APIs, microservices, and DevOps, and by remaining steadfast in our conviction to exit our last data centres in 2020 and becoming the first bank to go all-in on the public cloud. We’re powered by AWS and worked with them to improve their offering as well.
Going all-in on the cloud changed the centre of gravity for our engineering teams: instead of being constrained by legacy infrastructure, developers can focus on building great features and applications, data products, and machine learning and AI solutions. It gives us the speed, scale, and flexibility to use real-time data and AI to deliver more intelligent, personalized experiences and provide timely support for our entire customer base.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping every industry. How is Capital One integrating AI into its operations and customer experience, and what opportunities do you see emerging over the next few years?
Damjan Pelemis: Our investments in technology infrastructure and talent—along with our deep experience in machine learning—set us up to be at the forefront of enterprises leveraging AI. We continue to embed AI throughout our business with proprietary solutions built on our modern tech stack. Across the organization, we have hundreds of use cases in production that leverage AI or ML to drive value for our customers, associates, and the company.
We’re integrating AI where it can improve both the customer experience and the way our teams operate, from better understanding customer needs and pain points to building more intelligent, personalized experiences, with the biggest opportunity ahead being the ability to deliver the right help at the right time with responsible, well-managed execution.
As CTO of Capital One Canada, what skills and mindsets are you looking for in the next generation of Canadian technology talent, and how do you see the country’s workforce influencing Capital One’s global innovation strategy?
Damjan Pelemis: We’re searching for collaborative, curious individuals who are ready to build and own customer-facing features end-to-end, leveraging the latest tools and AI to tackle challenges in groundbreaking ways. Our ideal teammates are creative technical problem-solvers who naturally bridge the gap between technology and business intent, actively advocating for modern development practices, while remaining hungry for continuous experimentation and learning.
Canadian technologists bring the technical depth and growth mindset we need to solve high-impact problems at scale, and our Toronto team also has the opportunity to help shape products and platforms that serve millions of customers.
You spoke about AI-powered fraud detection capabilities developed by your Canadian technology teams that are now being used by employees across the organization globally. Can you tell us more about how this solution was created, what problem it was designed to solve, and what it says about the strategic role Canada’s technology talent plays in driving innovation across Capital One worldwide?
Damjan Pelemis: Fraud is an area where speed, accuracy, and trust all matter. Our in-house development of AI-powered fraud detection capabilities is part of a broader culture of engineering excellence that we’ve cultivated in Canada. As our team scaled, we recognized that fragmented delivery pipelines were creating unnecessary complexity and duplication.
To solve this, we engaged in a “barn-raising” type collaboration to build a singular, unified software delivery pipeline. By automating manual, error-prone processes and embedding compliance validation directly into the system, we significantly streamlined the developer experience. This open-source-first framework allows our engineers to focus on high-impact innovation rather than duplication, proving that when we consolidate our talent and tools, we drive efficiency and deliver better products for our customers globally.
