Open Bank, the digital-only subsidiary of Santander Group, has fully migrated to the cloud platform of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Image: Open Bank is the digital-only subsidiary of Santander. Photo: courtesy of Dagane/Wikipedia.org.
Open Bank will run its website, mobile application, core banking system and other production workloads on the AWS platform.
The Spanish digital bank, which has about 1.3 million customers, is expected to globally expand by leveraging the global infrastructure of AWS to increase redundancy and fault tolerance by replicating important systems in various geographic regions.
Santander’s subsidiary worked with AWS to move its mission-critical data lake located on-premises to a cloud-based architecture.
As of now, the data lake is using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Lambda, and Amazon Athena cloud services. AWS said that the three cloud solutions enable the bank’s data scientists and engineers to harness and analyze customer data, thereby helping customers to quickly arrive at better informed decisions.
AWS worldwide commercial sales vice president Mike Clayville said: “Santander’s Openbank collaborated with our industry experts to reassess their operating models, build anew, and implement strategies to accelerate product development, delivery, and upgrades in the cloud—all without compromising security and compliance.
“They are using AWS’s analytics services, big data capabilities, and machine learning services to make decision-making a science, rather than a guessing game, which has already had a major impact on the bank’s plans for long-term growth and expansion.”
Open Bank also utilized Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to develop a web and mobile front-end application. The front-end application aids in facilitating digital interactions with bank customers such as carrying out credit risk analysis, recommending investment strategies and requesting new loans.
Further, the Santander Group subsidiary is looking to use Amazon SageMaker and other advanced machine learning technologies of AWS to automate tasks involved in financial operations, said Openbank chief technology and operating officer Cristóbal Miralles. The digital bank will also use more analytics capabilities in order to get deeper insights into what its customers desire most.
Miralles said: “AWS enabled us to launch a secure and reliable digital bank in a multinational environment, complying with European regulation in record time.
“We are using the most comprehensive set of cloud services to evolve our customer service models, and help us meet the rigorous requirements of stakeholders and regulators who need transparency into and proof of robust security architectures that protect both our customers and proprietary data.”