Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced Monday that Bank Islam, Malaysia’s first listed Islamic financial services institution, has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider to power its digital transformation.
The bank is using the breadth and depth of AWS’s cloud capabilities, including containers, networking, and content delivery, to build the Be U digital bank to help customers better manage their finances, AWS said in a statement.
According to the statement, Bank Islam is building Be U through its centre of digital experience (CDX), an independent division which is developing new banking services on AWS to transform customer experiences.
Bank Islam has over five million customers who increasingly demand new and innovative digital banking services to better manage their finances, including quick response (QR) code payments, and automated supply-chain financing for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs). Before the establishment of CDX, the bank took more than a year to deploy a new financial service using its on-premises infrastructure.
By turning to AWS, Bank Islam can develop new digital financial services, including an app, a debit card, and a financing facility, in just a few weeks, to better serve customers.
Through CDX, Bank Islam can quickly develop and deliver a portfolio of digital financial services that comply with Islamic/Shariah financial requirements.
By using AWS, CDX also gains the agility to innovate rapidly to become more customer- centric at a lower cost, while complying with the bank’s stringent security and compliance control requirements.
CDX has also selected cloud-native AWS advanced technology partner Mambu to help further accelerate the bank’s digital transformation journey.
Mambu provisioned its cloud-native core banking solution on AWS to power CDX’s development environment in just one day, enabling the bank to build the Be U prototype in three months. This agility helped CDX validate its digital banking technology stack quickly, before beginning production of Be U.
On top of this platform, CDX is building new digital banking products using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which gives Bank Islam the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes container applications in the cloud.
With Amazon EKS, CDX can securely create applications that automatically scale and run in a highly available configuration to achieve increased fault tolerance and resilience.
With Amazon CloudFront, a content-delivery network service, CDX can deliver content, like educational videos and interactive forecasting tools, via Be U to help customers monitor their spending, control budgeting, and oversee all aspects of their banking experience, including authorizing international credit card spending.
AWS’s capabilities will allow Bank Islam’s strategic partners, including financial technology firms and digital marketplaces, to integrate and co-innovate with CDX to provide financial services like payments, financing, and financial advice via Be U, offering customers more ways to manage their finances digitally.
“Our aim is to raise the prosperity of all Malaysians, and AWS has given Bank Islam the ability to innovate and quickly launch new digital financial services that are meaningful to our customers’ financial health and well-being,” said Mohd Muazzam Mohamed, Chief Executive Officer of Bank Islam.
“We selected AWS as our preferred cloud provider to benefit from the highest levels of security and compliance, without sacrificing speed of innovation. We were able to develop a prototype for our Be U digital bank in only three months with AWS, and we can now explore advanced cloud services, like machine learning, to develop an alternative credit framework to broaden access to customers who would otherwise have difficulty obtaining a credit line,” he said.
Meanwhile, AWS ASEAN Managing Director Conor McNamara said banks of all sizes across Southeast Asia are using cloud technology to drive financial inclusion, deploy disruptive business models to attract customers in the face of new digital challenger banks, and ensure that they can hire and retain top talent.
“In Malaysia, Bank Islam is a great example of that. Working with AWS gives Bank Islam access to an unmatched portfolio of cloud services with the highest levels of security so they can deliver intuitive customer solutions quickly, securely, and at scale. We are proud to support Bank Islam on their journey to develop new digital business solutions to better serve Malaysians,” he added.