Standard Chartered Selects AWS to Power Its Strategic Banking Systems and Workloads

Distributed by Business Wire
12th November 2020

Leading financial institution forms strategic relationship with AWS to drive innovation and deliver new digital banking services with enhanced security and reliability

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), and Standard Chartered Bank plc (LON: STAN), a leading international banking group, announced a five year, strategic global agreement, which deepens the existing relationship between the two companies, and includes the bank running its strategic banking systems and customer facing applications on AWS. Standard Chartered Bank is collaborating with AWS to drive its digital transformation and deliver new personalized banking services in the bank’s 60 markets worldwide. Using AWS’s reliable infrastructure and cloud services across its entire business will enable the bank to be more responsive to customer needs and create new applications. Standard Chartered will adopt AWS to improve resiliency, security, and privacy, while meeting compliance requirements across the bank’s global footprint.

Adopting a cloud-first approach, Standard Chartered will use the breadth and depth of AWS services, including database, containers, compute, networking, storage, and security, to reinvent the digital banking experience, accelerating the design and deployment of new applications and digital services for its individual and corporate clients. Standard Chartered is using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run significant applications and quickly introduce new services with the utmost security, reliability, and scalability. For example, the bank launched its nexus banking-as-a service solution and Mox, its new virtual bank in Hong Kong, on AWS and continues to leverage AWS services to add new functionality to both. The bank’s award-winning global payments system, SC Pay, and core banking system, eBBS, are cloud-native services that use Amazon Aurora, a cloud-native relational database, to store details of banking and e-commerce transactions, including micropayments, resulting in faster and more secure transfer of funds with reduced cost per transaction. Standard Chartered’s Financial Market business, which includes risk management, financing, and investment services, uses AWS to run algorithms that assess market risk and leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to enable the bank to flexibly scale up those workloads during peak demand.

“Our continued work with AWS demonstrates our commitment to putting innovation and security at the heart of Standard Chartered’s digital transformation strategy,” said Dr. Michael Gorriz, Group Chief Information Officer of Standard Chartered. “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. 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.”

“Adopting a cloud-first approach makes our vision for next generation financial services – like virtual banking, next-generation payments, open banking, and banking as a service – a reality,” said Bhupendra Warathe, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Transformation, Standard Chartered. “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. We look forward to our continued partnership with AWS to deliver new products and solutions to our clients across the 60 markets we serve.”

“Standard Chartered Bank has been a trusted financial institution for the last 160 years and we are pleased that they have selected AWS as a strategic cloud provider to drive their digital transformation, while operating more efficiently and securely in the cloud,” said Frank Fallon, Vice President, Financial Services at Amazon Web Services, Inc. “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.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfilment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About Standard Chartered Bank

Standard Chartered is a leading international banking group, with a presence in 60 of the world’s most dynamic markets, and serving clients in a further 85. Our purpose is to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, and our heritage and values are expressed in our brand promise, Here for good.

Standard Chartered PLC is listed on the London and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges.

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