Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced today that Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) will migrate its IT infrastructure from on-premises to the world’s leading cloud by 2022.
The migration is intended to accelerate the bank’s digital transformation, improve customers’ digital banking experiences, and strengthen financial inclusion in the Philippines by bringing financial services to remote parts of the country.UnionBank willalso realize a cloud-only IT transformationstrategy, becoming the first major bank in the Philippines to be fully hosted in the cloud.
Today, 70 percent of the Philippines’ 110 million citizens live without access to financial services, according to the Milkin Institute. Using AWS’s proven infrastructure and capabilities, including containers, compute, storage, and databases, UnionBank is creating new digital banking experiences–accessible from mobile phones–thatwill scale to provide millions of Filipinoswith access to financial services,includingbank transfers and money withdrawals, even in very remote areas.UnionBank’s digital metrics gained significant traction this year, with strong first quarter results compared to the same period last year.
Close to 60,000 new digital bank accounts were opened every month,an increase of 4.37 times from the same quarter last year. Digital transactions increased by 380 percent from the same quarter last year.
UnionBank uses Amazon API Gateway and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to build new mobile banking products withmicroservices that support any application architecture, regardless of scale, load, or complexity. For example, the bank integrated electronic “Know Your Customer” (eKYC) capabilities into its mobile app,allowing customers to submit documents digitally to open a bank accountinstead of via post or by visiting a physical branch. Customers can also use the app to transfer moneyto other banks and deposit checks simply by taking a photo of the check.
When the migration is complete, UnionBank will run almost 400 mission-critical applications on AWS, including Finacle Core Banking and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud,to further modernize its IT infrastructure, drive operational efficiencies, and innovate new services.
By scaling its SAP workloads on demand using AWS, UnionBank expects to reduceinfrastructure maintenance and operation costs by USD1 million over the next five years. UnionBank is alsomigrating over 900virtual machines to VMware Cloud on AWS. As a result, itexpects to generate savings of over 30 percent over five years and create a return on investment in less than 18 months. In addition, the bank expects to benefit from increased staff productivity, reduced unplanned downtime, and increased business agility through faster deployment of new, externally-facing applications.
To accelerate its digital transformation by building cloud fluency across the organization,UnionBank is investing in a cloud trainingprogram for staff.The bank is providing training courses designed by AWS Training and Certification to more than 500 employees, including both in-depth technical training for information technology staff and cloud fundamentals training for business stakeholders. The program is also designed to foster a culture of learning to help UnionBank realizeits cloud-only IT strategy faster guided by robust IT risk management, data protection, data governance, and cybersecurity frameworks.
