Alphabet Inc’s Google has invested $1 billion in CME Group under the terms of a 10-year partnership between the companies. The organization has also struck a separate deal to move the futures exchange operator’s trading systems to the cloud.

The Chicago-based exchange operator will begin moving its technology infrastructure to Google Cloud next year. This deal with CME marks a big win for Google’s cloud business, which competes with other cloud service providers including Amazon and Microsoft for large, lucrative contracts from blue-chip Fortune 500 companies.

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The deal between Google and CME is a foothold in the financial services sector, which is starting to invest big money on cloud computing services like we all have witnessed for the past few months. Google’s $1 billion equity investment was in the form of non-voting convertible preferred stock of CME and was a partnership that would help CME provide easy access for more market participants, optimize costs and streamline IT infrastructure and other operations.

Philip Moyer, VP of strategic industries at Google Cloud also said that this wasn’t a standard deal where Google simply helps the customer move workloads to the cloud. Instead, it’s really a demonstration by Google and CME that the company is really committed to the long-term journey necessary to take the hardest elements of the financial services industry to the cloud.

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He further added that what made this deal so complex was that CME has the most demanding security, latency and redundancy and recovery requirements. The companies are not saying how the deal is structured in terms of costs, but the plan is to implement it across several phases, starting with the easiest workloads with the lowest latency requirements, followed by data analysis tooling.

In the second phase the company will focus on trying to innovate by doing more real-time data and analytics, and creating new products and making the markets more efficient. Finally, in the last phase, companies plan to move the most latency-sensitive parts of the workloads to the cloud.

But the big question here is also where the $1 billion investment fits in. From what Moyer said, it’s about showing CME that it too has skin in the game. The investment involves non-voting stock. There is no board seat and CME’s board is free to spend the money as it wishes but Moyer said that the investment is about showing that Google is invested in the long-term success of the relationship.

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