Itaú Unibanco partners with GFT to slash mainframe-to-cloud migration times by 70% using generative AI
Itaú Unibanco and GFT Technologies have launched an AI-driven tool called Batch2Cloud, cutting legacy mainframe migration times by 70% as the bank accelerates its transition to AWS.
If you hold shares in major global financial institutions or their technology partners, the massive, multi-million-dollar headache of migrating legacy mainframe systems to the cloud is a familiar risk. Historically, moving core banking operations off old mainframes has been notoriously slow, with average project timelines frequently slipping by nearly two years and budgets overrunning by more than 280%.
On October 13, 2026, Brazil’s largest private bank, Itaú Unibanco, and German digital transformation firm GFT Technologies announced a joint generative artificial intelligence solution designed to solve this exact bottleneck. Built on GFT's proprietary generative AI platform, Wynxx, the new tool—dubbed "Batch2Cloud"—has successfully cut the time required to migrate heavy, back-end "batch" processing routines from legacy mainframes to the cloud by 70% during its initial phase.
For global investors looking at the financial sector, Itaú Unibanco is the dominant banking giant in Latin America, serving over 60 million customers. The bank has been executing a massive, multi-year technological overhaul since 2018 to migrate its core systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS). While front-end user apps are easily modernized, the bank's heavy, back-end "batch" processes—such as daily account closures, transaction settlements, and reconciliations—have historically remained anchored to mainframe architecture due to their sheer complexity.
The Batch2Cloud tool addresses this by using generative AI agents to automatically map the complex legacy environments, identify code dependencies, and estimate the engineering effort required to port them to AWS. According to the companies' joint announcement on October 13, 2026, the AI-driven model not only slashed migration times by 70% but also accelerated project delivery speeds by 3.3 times. Technical architecture and final governance decisions remain under human control, while the AI automates repetitive code translation and validation.
This AI integration comes at a time when Itaú is aggressively ramping up its technology investments. According to the bank's financial disclosures, Itaú increased its technology spending to 6.2 billion reais ($1.2 billion) in the first half of 2026, representing a 6.6% increase compared to the same period in 2025. This surge in spending has been directly driven by cloud infrastructure costs and an 88% year-over-year increase in active generative AI initiatives.
By successfully moving these critical legacy workloads to AWS, Itaú aims to lower operational costs and deploy new digital products faster. For GFT Technologies, the successful rollout at Latin America's largest bank serves as a proof-of-concept. The tech firm plans to scale and sell the Batch2Cloud AI solution to other global financial institutions facing the same legacy mainframe bottlenecks.
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Itaú Unibanco is listed in New York as an American Depositary Receipt (ADR) under the ticker ITUB. Investors can also gain exposure to the bank through broad-market exchange-traded funds that track Brazilian equities, such as the iShares MSCI Brazil ETF (EWZ), which holds Itaú as one of its largest underlying assets.