Emirates NBD builds bank of future with Amazon Web Services

Dubai headquartered Emirates NBD is creating a bank of the future with artificial intelligence (AI) at its core.

The bank is using technology, including machine learning services from Amazon Web Services (AWS), to create personalised banking for its customers.

Emirates NBD is already a leading digital bank, with 90% of all financial transactions and requests conducted outside of its branches. The plan is to go further by gaining a better understanding of customers through technologies such as data analytics, the internet of things (IoT) and natural language processing to provide services that meet their needs. 

Through AWS, Emirates NBD will use SageMaker, a fully managed service for building, training and deploying machine learning models used to offer customers real-time banking.

It is also using an AWS machine learning service, known as Amazon Personalize, which makes recommendations to customers based on their banking needs. This will include a personal digital finance manager that uses an automated, self-learning system to deliver a personalised banking to customers.

The digital finance manager uses natural language processing technology so customers can use it to interact with a call centre, and will harness Amazon Polly to access advanced deep learning technologies to convert written content into human-like speech.

“Our vision is to be the Middle East’s most innovative financial services organisation”

In its branches, the bank wants to use AWS’s image recognition and IoT solutions to create convenient and secure authentication for customers. The bank has operations in UAE, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India, Singapore and the UK, with a total of 234 branches.

“Our vision is to be the Middle East’s most innovative financial services organisation,” said Suvo Sarkar, group head for retail banking and wealth management at Emirates NBD. “Emirates NBD and Amazon share common values of innovation and customer centricity, and we look forward to leveraging AWS’s technologies and innovation practices to make banking more easy and intuitive for our customers.”

In 2017, it launched a digital bank that it hopes will appeal to tech-savvy millennials by focusing on mobile services and social media. The Liv. app, as it is known, is designed to learn and adapt to customer preferences.

“Across every industry, companies are starting to meaningfully use machine learning in their businesses. We are excited to see how these technologies are helping transform the financial services industry in the Middle East and around the world,” said Andy Isherwood, managing director at AWS EMEA.