How AI Is Helping Financial Services Companies in Virginia Beach Cut Costs and Improve Efficiency

Virginia Beach has quietly become a strategic “digital port” that matters for AI in financial services because world-class subsea cables and growing carrier‑neutral data centers let local banks and wealth managers process massive data with low latency and international reach.

Cables like MAREA, BRUSA and Dunant land at Corporate Landing and feed a Richmond NAP, moving data at record speeds (MAREA can carry 200 Tbps - roughly 12,000 HD movies per second), while projects such as Globalinx's expansion and PointOne's NAP add carrier‑neutral colocation and redundancy to the Hampton Roads ecosystem; the city even reduced tax rates and certified Dominion Energy power for data centers to attract capacity.

That infrastructure means AI models, real‑time risk analytics, and cross‑border payments can run faster and cheaper, and upskilling programs - like Nucamp's AI Essentials for Work - give finance teams practical prompt and tool skills to capture those savings.

Learn more on the Virginia Beach economic development page, the Globalinx project announcement, or the Nucamp AI Essentials for Work syllabus.

“With a plethora of regulations, permitting, local permissions and construction, among other obstacles landing subsea cables requires a lot of expertise, energy, patience and capital. At the end day, when a company succeeds in doing so, it adds another layer of redundancy, resilience and capacity to a rapidly increasing need in preparation for present and future AI and cloud needs.” - Greg Twitt, Globalinx Founder and President

Virginia Beach economic development information | Globalinx subsea cable project details | Nucamp AI Essentials for Work syllabus and registration

Virginia Beach's local infrastructure is becoming the backbone that lets AI run where it matters for finance: at low latency and with global reach. Corporate Landing and carrier‑neutral campuses like Globalinx and PointOne tie transoceanic capacity directly into colocation and NAP facilities, and recent projects - including Globalinx's Sandbridge expansion with seven new tunnel bores and capacity expected to grow more than 400% - turn the city into a resilient “digital port” for banks, payment processors, and wealth shops that need real‑time models and cross‑border throughput.

Dominion‑certified data‑center sites, reduced local tax rates and the Regional Connectivity Ring link subsea landings to Richmond and Northern Virginia, creating redundant fiber paths and cheaper power options that lower operating costs for AI workloads.

For firms evaluating where to run latency‑sensitive risk analytics or hybrid cloud inference, Virginia Beach now offers an edge alternative to crowded metro hubs (see the state's data center overview and the Globalinx project announcement for details).

“Globalinx has been a driving force to establish Virginia Beach as the premier digital port on the East Coast. This expansion enhances our digital infrastructure, further strengthening our position to ship digital traffic throughout Virginia Beach and our surrounding communities, and across the globe.” - Amanda Jarratt, Virginia Beach Deputy City Manager

For Virginia Beach financial firms, the top AI cost‑cutting plays center on smarter fraud prevention, automated bookkeeping, and sharper operations analytics: AI platforms that perform real‑time transaction monitoring can cut false positives and slash manual review hours - improving detection speed and lowering loss exposure (AI‑powered, real‑time fraud detection); automated reconciliation prompts free up accounting time by handling repetitive QuickBooks work that used to consume staff hours (automated QuickBooks reconciliation prompts); and model‑driven default management and capacity planning - areas highlighted by locally relevant leadership hires - help redeploy people from rule‑based tasks into higher‑value client work (Chartway's announcement on default management and fraud leadership).

Together these use cases shorten decision cycles, reduce outsourcing to costly investigations, and let teams focus on advisory services - the kind of efficiency that translates into measurable payroll and operational savings.

“We are thrilled to welcome Ross to the Chartway team,” said George Pita, Chartway's chief credit & portfolio officer.

Generative AI gives Virginia Beach banks and wealth managers a clear set of opportunities to turn local low‑latency infrastructure into concrete savings and service lifts: build GenAI knowledge management systems to surface institutional know‑how and personalize client outreach, deploy intelligent virtual assistants to deflect routine service requests and shorten response times, automate document processing and loan underwriting to cut turnaround from days to minutes, and run real‑time fraud and compliance monitors that learn evolving threats - use cases captured in industry playbooks like the Eraneos article on GenAI knowledge management for banks (Eraneos GenAI knowledge management for banks) and Capacity's roundup of generative AI in banking use cases (Capacity generative AI in banking use cases).

Paired with Virginia Beach's carrier‑neutral NAPs and subsea cable connectivity, firms can host domain‑specific models or private inference close to where data moves, so an advisor can pull insights from tens of thousands of research reports in seconds while routine tasks get automated - freeing people to focus on high‑value advice and client relationships.

“The aspirations were not just for a proof of concept or a tightly bound document retrieval system. The challenge was to design a wholesale architecture for a generative AI lab, ensuring precise responses while maintaining strict information security protocols,” - Guy Sheppard

Operational automation is already delivering hard dollars and hours back to financial firms that colocate workloads near Virginia Beach's subsea‑powered data hubs: industry research shows automation leaders commonly report six‑figure annual savings (69% said $100,000+ and modern integrated solutions can save an average of $375,000+ per year), and local accounts payable automation can slash invoice costs and cycle times by large margins - improving AP throughput by as much as 81% while cutting processing costs dramatically (SMA Technologies 2024 State of Automation report, Virginia Beach accounts payable automation consulting).

Real-world programs underscore the scale: a federal center processing more than two million invoices annually reduced one‑third of invoices to under two minutes (versus 15–20 days before), with estimated improper‑payment avoidance in the hundreds of millions - a level of impact that turns latency‑sensitive AI and RPA projects from curious pilots into balance‑sheet levers for regional banks, credit unions and fintechs (Discover enterprise RPA case studies).

“Since we installed this and had it rough and running, we estimate it's saved us about $515 million that would otherwise have to go to a ...”

For Virginia Beach financial firms, governance and security around AI should be operationalized the moment a project moves beyond a pilot: establish a cross‑functional AI governance committee, map every in‑use and third‑party model into an AI inventory, and apply a risk‑based playbook that prioritizes high‑impact mortgage, underwriting and AML systems for testing and documentation.

Practical controls include rigorous pre‑deployment validation, annual independent model reviews, vendor transparency clauses and tamper‑resistant audit trails so decisions can be reconstructed for examiners - steps echoed in Holistic AI's end‑to‑end governance approach and Kaufman Rossin's emphasis on model documentation and validation.

Regulators are watching too: FINRA and the SEC expect firms to supervise AI like any other business tool, which means clear recordkeeping, human‑in‑the‑loop checkpoints and continuous monitoring for drift, bias or data‑poisoning; without those safeguards a single opaque model can trigger expensive look‑backs and remediation.

Treating AI as both a strategic cost lever and a regulated asset - backed by red‑teaming, staff training, and tiered authorized‑use policies - keeps local firms compliant, resilient, and ready to host sensitive inference workloads on Virginia Beach's subsea‑connected data infrastructure (see Holistic AI governance platform, Kaufman Rossin model risk guidance, and FINRA/SEC expectations for actionable next steps).

“You need to know what's happening with the information that you feed into that tool.” - Andrew Mount, Counsel, Eversheds Sutherland

Building the talent pipeline that will staff Virginia Beach's expanding data centers and AI teams is now a whole‑of‑Commonwealth effort: statewide tools like the new Virginia Has Jobs AI Career Launch Pad connect Virginians to no‑cost and low‑cost AI training and scholarships from partners such as Google, while community colleges are standing up practical, industry‑aligned pathways - Northern Virginia Community College's Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics certificate (a one‑year, 22‑credit program) and NOVA Workforce's FastForward IT Specialist: Artificial Intelligence course are explicit examples that bundle hands‑on skills, cert prep, and employer ties; shorter offerings like the ITD‑195 AI Practitioner course add a 45‑hour primer on LLMs, generative AI and RAG for people pivoting into AI roles.

Employer partnerships, apprenticeship models and targeted funding (FastForward, G3, NOVAnext for displaced federal workers) mean firms in Hampton Roads can recruit locals trained in prompt engineering, model ops and cloud fundamentals without competing only for distant metro talent - an outcome made tangible by NOVA's industry collaborations and the state's one‑stop AI hub that includes thousands of scholarship seats to scale talent quickly.

Learn how to enroll in NOVA's AI & Data Analytics program or explore the Virginia Has Jobs launch pad to see which credential fits your team's needs.

“AI is increasingly part of every aspect of work, and we're excited to launch this opportunity for Virginians to take part in this future.” - Governor Glenn Youngkin

Turn Virginia Beach's subsea‑connected advantage into measurable savings with a phased, compliance‑minded rollout: begin with a short “foundation” pilot to assess AI maturity, vet data quality, and prove value quickly - Nominal recommends a 1‑month pilot with targets like 70%+ automation and ~50% time savings for a chosen finance workflow - and fold those learnings into a city‑aligned AI roadmap that maps to local IT milestones (assess maturity → build infrastructure → measure success) from the City of Virginia Beach's Information Technology plan (Virginia Beach Information Technology performance plan and milestones); next, expand and harden controls over 3–12 months by scaling pilots, integrating with ERP systems, and standing up governance and vendor transparency as recommended in Blueflame's phased guide and Presidio's readiness checklist (Nominal four‑phase finance AI implementation roadmap and pilot guidance, Virginia High‑Risk AI regulatory obligations and compliance requirements); finally, aim to mature into a 12–24 month operating model with centers of excellence, continuous monitoring, and regular model reviews so AI becomes a reliable, auditable cost lever rather than a one‑off experiment - enough structure to turn a pilot into consistent payroll and processing savings.

Concrete case examples from big banks and local partnerships make the AI opportunity in Virginia Beach feel actionable: JPMorgan's COIN platform - an AI‑powered contract intelligence system that cut roughly 360,000 manual review hours to seconds and now analyzes some 12,000 commercial credit agreements annually - shows how automating dense legal and back‑office work can free teams for higher‑value advising (JPMorgan COIN contract intelligence case study); similarly, enterprise rollouts of internal LLM assistants demonstrate how knowledge retrieval and task automation scale across hundreds of thousands of workers, accelerating research and client workflows (JPMorgan LLM Suite enterprise assistant case studies).

Those national playbooks translate locally when paired with Virginia Beach's subsea‑connected data hubs and community programs - small banks and credit unions can mirror COIN‑style automation for loan documents, or adopt Nucamp's practical prompts and workflows for QuickBooks reconciliation to shave hours from SMB servicing (Nucamp AI Essentials syllabus: practical prompts and workflows for financial operations).

The takeaway is vivid: a process that once required a roomful of reviewers can become a fingertip query, turning legacy cost centers into fast, auditable services that regional firms can host on local, low‑latency infrastructure.

“New employees come in, can ask questions and get answers, and it's a really great example of how we're thinking about day to day productivity with the tooling that we've started with LLM Suite...” - Katie Hainsey

In Virginia Beach, the promise of faster, cheaper AI-powered finance rests on a simple trade-off: capture efficiency from nearby subsea‑connected data centers and big state investments, but pair that capacity with careful planning, resilient grids and worker upskilling so gains aren't erased by outages, regulatory pushback, or community backlash.

Deloitte's research on scaling data‑center and grid capacity flags the infrastructure lift required to sustain an AI economy, and major moves like the announced $9 billion Virginia cloud and AI expansion show why the region must plan for both growth and impact - from power and water to local jobs.

Practical steps for local banks and credit unions include short compliance‑minded pilots, model inventories, and targeted training so staff move from routine tasks to higher‑value advisory work; businesses can start by exploring upskilling options such as the AI Essentials for Work syllabus to build prompt, tooling and governance skills close to home.

“While we're investing a significant amount in the AI space and in infrastructure, we would like to have more capacity than we already have today,” - Andy Jassy