Financial institutions are now considering how they fit within the world of digital banking as customer expectations, regulations, and new digital banking licenses drive change across the industry. At the same time, many consumers are considering a move to digital-only banks as their appetite increases for digital channels and personalization. Digital banks can meet regulatory requirements while developing new business models by building a secure, scalable, and innovative platform in the cloud with AWS.
Digital banks are finding a home on AWS
Benefits
Innovate faster
Build microservices architecture and enable intraday releases. You can also scale horizontally and spin up services effectively in the cloud.
Implement the highest level of security
AWS can help create a digital foundation—and adhere to strict regulatory guidelines on your path to building a digital bank.
Leverage AWS’ expertise when building digital banks
Leverage AWS's experience and expertise with guidance on compliance and security when engaging a regulator on cloud adoption. AWS understands the unique security and compliance obligations financial institutions face on a global scale.
Types of digital banks
-
Challenger Banks
-
Digital Bank Offshoots
-
Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) Players
-
Challenger Banks
-
Challenger Banks
Independent start-up bank with a banking license
Customer case studies
Learn how Chime migrated to AWS to help engineers and developers provide better services, more uptime, reliable data, security, and a sound foundation and a successful platform for their rapidly growing member base.
Judo Bank has leveraged AWS to build a system enabling traditional relationship banking backed by modern, legacy-free technology, processes, and systems.
Monzo runs 1500+ core-banking microservices on AWS that allow its over half a million customers to instantly transfer funds, freeze and unfreeze lost cards, and manage their money by setting spending targets.
Nubank has rapidly scaled its services with AWS, managing 23+ million customers and providing credit cards and digital accounts in Latin America.
Qonto leverages services like AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway to quickly create business functionalities in a domain regulated by PCI-DSS compliance.
Starling, a UK challenger bank, decided to build a frictionless, cloud-native mobile banking application and invited third parties to integrate with its marketplace, to offer an exceptional digital experience and tailored banking products to its customers.
TymeBank migrated 85% of its infrastructure to AWS and runs its mission-critical payments service in a containerized architecture built on Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.
WeLab Bank runs 95% of its workloads on AWS and worked closely with AWS to ensure it met regulatory requirements specific to virtual banking.
-
Digital Bank Offshoots
-
Digital Bank Offshoots
Subsidiary or extension of an existing incumbent bank
Customer case studies
Mox Bank Limited (Mox), one of the fastest-growing banks in Hong Kong history, went from initial licensing to market deployment of its cloud-native and digital bank in 18 months. In the first month alone, it signed up over 35,000 customers.
Nequi, the first digital bank in Colombia, part of Grupo Bancolombia, was created in 2015. Using AWS services, the financial institution successfully migrated applications, including the SAP software’s planning resources, to the cloud.
Open Bank, S.A. ("Openbank"), a subsidiary of Santander Group, runs on the world’s leading cloud for the most reliable infrastructure and the ability to innovate quickly and more frequently on behalf of its 1.3 million customers in Spain.
Georgia’s TBC Bank—one of the two biggest banks in the country—wanted to complement its existing services by creating a digital, cloud-only challenger bank, which it called Space Neobank. Established in 2018, Space Neobank provides retail banking services to more than 200,000 customers across Georgia. The cloud-only bank launched in 8 months, using AWS.
TNEX is the first digital-only bank in Vietnam and has launched all-in on AWS, leveraging a Mambu core and Amazon Managed Services (AMS). This has enabled TNEX to focus on how they differentiate and serve their customers by leveraging AI and Machine Learning. In this session, hear from Bryan Carroll, CEO of TNEX Vietnam, on how TNEX Bank was built working backwards from a bowl of soup.
-
Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) Players
-
Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) Players
Provide banking processes as a service using an existing licensed bank's regulated infrastructure
Customer case studies
Berlin-based Solarisbank is Europe’s leading BaaS platform for business customers across industries. As a bank with a full German banking license, Solarisbank enables other companies to offer their own financial services.
Nexus, the cloud-based banking-as-a-service platform of Standard Chartered, allows the bank to distribute its financial services products to Bukalapak's ecommerce clients while complying with Indonesia's data sovereignty requirements. As Nexus was built for scale on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it can quickly add large numbers of new customers and partners.
Goldman Sachs Transaction Banking (TxB) has streamlined client onboarding and offers rapid account opening. TxB’s banking-as-a-service platform strives to provide 24/7 availability (99.8% payment processing uptime as of September 2021). The platform enables digital wallets to simplify online payments for retail and small to mid-size businesses, and APIs enable partners to onboard and service clients.
Modernize Core Banking on AWS
Enabling cloud-led banking transformation
Featured AWS Consulting Partners
Featured AWS Technology Partners
Accelerate innovation while staying compliant on AWS
We engage with financial regulatory bodies to shape the future of digital banking together. AWS meets with regulatory agencies throughout the world to shape emerging digital banking license frameworks. We know that digital banks are most successful on the cloud, so we share how we approach security and compliance and present the various tools and services that enable financial services customers to build secure, scalable, and innovative digital banks with AWS.
We will continue to be at the forefront of engaging regulatory agencies as they consider, propose, and update regulatory requirements that affect AWS and our customers. Our goal remains simple – to seek the best policy and regulatory outcomes for our financial services customers to build on the cloud.
We are committed to deliver an operating environment for our customers to innovate with confidence. As digital banking regulations continue to advance, AWS is committed to help customers respond to new rules and guidelines. In many cases, AWS makes it easier for customers to comply with different regulations and frameworks around the world. AWS continues to support our customers’ cloud-driven innovation and transform the financial services industry globally to meet changing consumer behaviors and expectations. If you have any questions about digital banking regulatory framework and the application to your use of AWS, please reach out to your account representative or request to be contacted. We have a team of policy, regulatory, and technology experts with financial services background ready to support you.
Related resources
Building an end-to-end Kubernetes-based DevSecOps software factory on AWS
Read the blog »Building a digital Bank in Asia Pacific has never been as quick and cost effective
Learn more »GFT's Digital Bank Launcher accelerator
Learn more »AWS Cloud Governance for Financial Services
Learn more »Read the latest digital banking AWS blog posts
How Monzo built a bank of the future on AWS
Today Monzo has more than four million current account customers, with that number growing all the time, and it has operated on the AWS cloud from day one. Chris Evans, Technical Director for Platform and Reliability at Monzo, explains: “AWS has helped Monzo to operate reliably and scale rapidly, providing the secure infrastructure needed for this new form of online banking” […]
The Great Migration: Chime’s Move to AWS
This blog post is co-authored in partnership with the Chime Engineering team. Mike Barrett, VP of Engineering Services at Chime remembers when he first heard the term “undifferentiated heavy lifting“. The term was coined by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, in a presentation he gave in 2006 at MIT to describe all the hard IT […]
OakNorth Turns Risk into Opportunity with Tech
By now, it’s commonplace for banks to claim the mantle of “tech company.” But for OakNorth, tech and banking truly go hand-in-hand. Its data and technology platform, OakNorth Analytical Intelligence (ONAI), allows it to do balance sheet lending via OakNorth Bank in the UK, profitably originating over £2 billion without a single default or late payment since its launch […]
How Financial Services Institutions Measure Business Value from Digital Initiatives by Using Net Technology Investment Value
Financial services institutions (FSIs) have increasingly defined and differentiated themselves not just by the products and services they provide to customers, but by the technology that underpins their establishments. The unexpected shift in global market conditions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for successful digital transformation initiatives that deliver concrete positive business […]
Reinventing the Banking Model with Starling Bank
Having worked at large banking institutions her whole career, Anne Boden felt that she was spending more and more of her time holding back the tide of new technology that looked set to change the banking industry. In an increasingly mobile, as-a-service retail environment, established banking models were fast becoming outdated and Anne saw that as an opportunity […]
Leveraging AWS CloudFormation to create an immutable infrastructure at Nubank
Nubank, a Brazilian company that is one of the world’s largest independent digital banks, is innovatively transforming Latin America’s financial landscape by providing transparent, simple, and efficient services. The company fights complexity to empower people, give them back control of their finances, and redefine their relationships with money […]