Capital One’s Distinguished Engineer and Director, Simran Kaur, sat down with David Morken, Bandwidth’s Founder and CEO at Reverb25.
Transcript:
[Music] [Applause]
David: Capital One is one of the largest banks in the United States, headquartered in McLean, Virginia, and has carved out an incredible reputation for blending financial services with technology-driven innovation.
Simran and her team at Capital One are 100% doing telephony in the cloud. They are ranked number one according to J.D. Power’s National Banking Customer Satisfaction Survey and they’re ranked 15th on Fortune’s magazine list for 100 best companies to work for. Speaking of all that excellence at Capital One, we are joined by Simran Kaur. Simran is a Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, which is the coolest title ever. She has a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington and was formerly at Avaya for nine years as a technical manager. Thank you, Simran, for your five years of incredible partnership and for joining us at Reverb.
Simran: Thanks. Glad to be here.
David: So, I’ll jump right in and I want to start with the big picture. Why is customer experience such a non-negotiable at Capital One?
Simran: Sure. So, customer experience is not just an option. It’s part of the product we offer. It’s the driving force behind business success. We don’t just ship financial products. We deliver trust, simplicity, and a seamless experience across every line of business for each one of Capital One’s customers. It’s a promise underpinning everything we do.
David: Your scope, personally, is ginormous. It’s massive. Can you paint a picture of the underlying complexity that you and your team are managing?
Simran: As you know, Capital One is a constellation of business units. You know, each with its own unique needs and demands—think about a huge variety of communication flows, contact centres, and regulatory requirements. But the guiding principle is to keep that complexity invisible, in every call in every verification, as frictionless as possible. You know, as a real-life example, we are doing real-time seamless fraud detection at scale, without impacting the customer experience. We saw that during the transition in COVID where agents shifted home but they were still taking calls and servicing calls without a glitch, despite the scale.
David: That is extraordinary, taking me back to those days when all the calls were going home. We’ve journeyed alongside you for several years, and we know that you’re not just a cloud adopter; you guys are cloud innovators. What does that look like in practice to push those frontiers?
Simran: Capital One didn’t just adopt cloud early. We fully embraced it. We saw the future—it was digital, agile, real-time, intelligent, and infinitely scalable. We led the move to a cloud-first architecture, and that has benefited us tremendously. Just an example, the call volume agility that we just spoke about. Migration to the cloud has had many complexities across our company’s communication stack, but it has also presented us with unique opportunities. When we were first leading this cloud journey, we met with Bandwidth, and it was your team’s innovative approach that helped us truly unlock the potential of that complexity.
David: Thank you and let’s talk about the opportunity that it brought in three parts. First, control and visibility—what problem surfaced in your contact center traffic?
Simran: Before migrating to Bandwidth, we consistently saw brittle connections—network connections, agent connections, without much visibility into the root cause. This lack of visibility into why it was happening, and where it was happening—it was a very common theme during those early days with the traditional telco partners. After a conversation with Bandwidth, our two teams solution architecting together, we realized a few things there. First of all, the limits of that particular setup. That setup was inadvertently flooding PSTN markets. Think about calls transiting between different carrier networks before terminating. That’s not just an inconvenience; it’s a direct hit to the customer experience that we so deeply care for.
David: I know that customer experience is paramount for both our companies. I’m curious, from your view, for that particular problem, what did we do together to fix it?
Simran: We needed enterprise-grade solutions, which gave Bandwidth an opportunity to deliver. The first one being the next-gen end-to-end IP network. We now have the ability to view the call entirely from one end to the other end within Bandwidth’s parameters, eliminating those unnecessary PSTN hops. When calls are terminated to the IVR platforms, CCaaS, or UCaas— whatever platform it has to go to—this ability to see the call flow end-to-end is a huge benefit from an operational and troubleshooting perspective. We have a rich set of APIs. Now we can take a whole routing construct embedded within Capital One’s internal network, and then engineering teams can make changes at any time as the need arises. Not to forget the multicarrier redundancy that we have for toll-free.
David: With that first opportunity solved, which was control and visibility, you shared that our second opportunity for working together was to deliver security at speed. How did you protect the experience while also moving faster?
Simran: Security at speed is a challenge when everything shifts to the cloud. Our customer experience is reliant on speed, accuracy of caller authentication and verification when calls first come into Capital One. This is a very dynamic situation where the fraud landscape is changing all the time. We need to react in real time—as those changes demand, as the fraud engines demand—to minimize those threats. This same visibility of the cloud that we have with Bandwidth, we’re able to extend that to these additional tools, and this is a critical advantage for our most secure call flows, especially the highly regulated business units where we need that visibility and security.
David: Yeah, you guys are definitely regulated. Let me ask you in this particular example that you used—what did we do here on this, in that case?
Simran: Now we have direct integrations into our CCaaS, UCaaS, and all other platforms as opposed to having a fixed, rigid blueprint for these integrations. This is enabling us to apply treatments where they actually make most sense, as opposed to going into a single kind of integration. This is without compromising security. This is giving us the speed to deploy faster. It is allowing us to do a plug-and-play between the newest and the best technologies out there. We are also performing percentage-based AB testing between these applications to solve for the most complex needs.
David: That’s awesome. Okay. So with one and two underway, you had a third challenge—you had to scale everything in your infrastructure to take on new challenges. What does scale look like for you, and what did you need from us?
Simran: As complexity increases, the demand for scale increases; we need telecom partners to scale their operations and workflows just like software companies. And Bandwidth is doing that. Our teams are working on a complete set of rich APIs stack, which is critical for enterprises that are enabling automation, governance and operational automation. And access to industry expertise and support—Bandwidth is the first partner we call when there’s an issue, and your teams jump on even when the issue is not Bandwidth so yeah, it’s been a great partnership.
David: Thank you very much. I love hearing that. What is the next opportunity you think you might be bringing us?
Simran: I’d say continued co-creation. Let’s turn the next layer of complexity (in)to the next advantage. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your partnership. Thanks for challenging and pushing us every step of the way.
Please join me in a round of applause for Simran Kaur from Capital One.
[Applause]
Enterprises like Capital One balance customer excellence with control, security, and scale by bringing Bandwidth as the carrier for their communications platforms.
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