Standard Chartered embarks on five-year personalised banking push with AWS

Standard Chartered Bank is deepening its long-standing ties with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by signing a global, five-year deal that will see it migrate its core banking systems and customer-facing applications to the public cloud giant’s infrastructure.

The migration is part of a body of work the financial services firm is doing that will focus on delivering a more personalised banking experience to customers in all 60 of the global markets that it operates, while rolling out new applications to its clients.

The company is already known to be a long-term user of AWS’s cloud services, having initially taken steps to migrate the infrastructure and complex computer modelling underpinning its risk-analysis grid to the cloud for scalability and cost reduction purposes in 2015.

In a case study published by AWS in 2019, the company revealed it was drawing on the serverless capabilities of AWS Lambda to manage the provisioning of its grid, and the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) to maintain the capacity of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances it runs on.

The company is known to have expanded its use of AWS further since then. First of all to underpin the roll-out of its app-based virtual banking service Mox in Hong Kong in September 2020, and it is also known to rely on the Amazon Aurora cloud-native relational database to underpin its global payments system, SC Pay.

“A significant number of Standard Chartered’s flagship applications, like our core banking system, eBBS, global payment system, SC Pay, as well as our new digital banking services, Mox and nexus, are already cloud-native,” said Bhupendra Warathe, CTO of cloud transformation at Standard Chartered.

“We look forward to our continued partnership with AWS to deliver new products and solutions to our clients across the 60 markets we serve.”

Furthermore, Standard Chartered’s Financial Market risk management arm also uses EC2 to enable it to scale-up during busy periods and run algorithms that assess market risk.

Michael Gorriz, group CIO of Standard Chartered, said the decision to deepen its ties with AWS is proof of its commitment to putting “innovation and security” front and centre of its cloud-first, digital transformation plan.

“A cloud-first strategy allows us to be more agile and client-focused so our customers have better experiences and faster access to innovative new products. At the same time, we are improving our operational efficiency and resilience by using the best-in-class security, privacy and compliance delivered through cloud infrastructure,” said Gorriz.

“We are pleased to collaborate with AWS as a long-term strategic cloud provider and take advantage of their broad portfolio of cloud services and proven expertise to bring secure cloud solutions to the financial services industry.”

Frank Fallon, vice-president of financial services at AWS, said: “With this agreement, Standard Chartered is relying upon the most secure, reliable, and flexible cloud computing environment in the world.

“AWS’s unparalleled experience in powering global financial institutions will enable Standard Chartered to transition to the cloud with confidence and innovate faster than ever before,” he added.