There have been widespread shifts in recent years, with more companies using cloud computing to increase system speed, agility, and responsiveness to client demands. Amazon Web Services claims that this trend is most pronounced in the Southeast Asian market, where consumers are increasingly demanding digital, real-time, and intelligent service from all providers.
This is most obvious in the many recent business partnerships AWS has closed in the Southeast Asian region. As of late, AWS has entered into partnerships with Trust Bank in Singapore, Timo Bank in Vietnam, and Pos Malaysia, the national postal agency of Malaysia. In order to expand rapidly, diversify their product lines, and enhance their customers’ experiences, each of these businesses has made the same decision: To adopt AWS.
Vietnam
Timo, the top digital bank in Vietnam, designed and launched its cloud-native core banking infrastructure on AWS in just six months, Amazon Web Services revealed at AWS re:Invent, its largest annual conference held in Las Vegas this year. Thanks to the cloud banking platform, Timo will be able to expand its operations and attract 5 million new customers within the next three years.
Timo is enabling clients to lead financially sound lives by providing convenient digital banking services like payments and savings solutions by leveraging the full range of AWS capabilities, including computation, data analytics, and machine-learning. Over two million monthly financial transactions, including transfers, management, and savings, are being facilitated by Timo for its users in Vietnam via mobile devices. Timo, with the help of AWS, can cater to its clientele’s specific financial requirements while still maintaining the highest standards of security and regulatory compliance.
Timo’s mission was to help the 69% of Vietnam’s population that does not have access to a bank by providing them with unique and individualised mobile banking services. When it came time to move Timo’s banking, payments, and mobile app to the cloud, the company teamed up with AWS Partner Mambu to create a nimble, scalable, and secure environment. With the help of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS), a managed container service, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides safe, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, Timo can effortlessly grow workloads on demand.
By 2025, Timo’s transaction volume is predicted to expand by a factor of 10 thanks to its scalability, allowing more Vietnamese clients to quickly and easily move money between their mobile bank accounts or pay online merchants. Timo constructed a data lake with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a cloud object storage service, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glue, a serverless data integration service, to assist finance companies in creating innovative solutions for their customers. All of Timo’s sensitive information on its customers’ demographics and financial activities is kept in this data lake, where it is stored safely and in compliance with all relevant regulations. By leveraging the customer data stored in the lake and Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service for building, training, and deploying machine-learning models, Timo is able to offer individualised financial services. Timo, by analysing client spending patterns, can make recommendations for cost-cutting measures and offer discounts through strategic alliances, so fostering financial independence.
To ensure that Timo’s cloud team and IT personnel are well-versed in the newest cloud technology, the company partnered with AWS to provide training in architecture, development, security, big data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and machine-learning. Teams were able to validate their knowledge of AWS services and their ability to put them to use in practice throughout these workshops, all while learning and implementing new cloud capabilities to develop cutting-edge digital financial services. Timo’s cloud team became more efficient thanks to this training because they were able to use AWS for infrastructure automation, application deployment, and IT administration without having to hire more people.
“Digital Banks like Timo are mission focused to serve customers, drive financial inclusion and economic empowerment,” said Pete Murray, ASEAN Head of Financial Services at AWS. “Timo has developed a unique banking proposition on AWS including services that solve customer pain points working backwards from the mission to develop economic empowerment. We are excited to support Timo as the company grows. Their recent win at the Vietnamese Technology Excellence Awards recognising their payments innovation in partnership with OpenWay is a testament to their success. At AWS, we look forward to seeing the already thriving Vietnamese financial services technology community evolve.”
Singapore
Trust Bank, Singapore’s first cloud-native financial institution, has chosen AWS to run its operations. Trust, being built on AWS, is nimble enough to respond quickly to consumer feedback while also being scalable enough to accommodate a constantly expanding user base.
The Trust platform, which was launched on AWS and is supported by a collaboration between Standard Chartered Bank and FairPrice Group, has already signed up more than 300,000 customers. Trust’s convenient app provides access to a number of services, such as credit cards, savings accounts, and personal accident insurance for you and your loved ones. The FairPrice Group and its loyalty program, Link Rewards, are two examples of how Singapore’s consumer ecosystem is built on a foundation of trust that allows its customers to make substantial savings on regular purchases.
Trust is a financial services company that uses Amazon Web Services to provide its customers with a straightforward interface and quick onboarding (less than three minutes for a savings account and less than four minutes for a credit card). Trust also provided the first numberless credit card, which lets customers select their own payment date and the first mobile app that lets cardholders with numerous accounts toggle between their credit and debit cards.
Trust is using AWS to create cutting-edge digital goods, such as a spending tracker integrated into the app for keeping tabs on Linkpoints as they are accrued in real-time. Customers can earn Linkpoints by making purchases at FairPrice and other Link partners and can use these points to get quick discounts on future purchases. As a result of being hosted in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region, Trust is better able to comply with regulations pertaining to the residency of its customer data. This, in turn, benefits Trust’s customers by providing them with a first-rate banking platform that is robust across multiple availability zones and features ultra-low latency for a smooth banking experience.
Standard Chartered Bank and the FairPrice Group needed a highly scalable, agile environment to launch the first of a new wave of digitally native banks in the country, which required the ability to easily handle large volumes of new consumers and rapidly iterate to provide a seamless and engaging user experience. When it comes to accommodating a rising number of additional accounts and services, Trust effortlessly scales thanks to Amazon Elastic Computation Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that delivers safe, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Trust uses the cloud-based relational database management technology Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to store real-time information including customer reviews and recent purchases. Using this information, the bank is able to enhance the convenience of its app by adding features like customisable credit limits and flexible payment schedules for credit cards.
Trust Bank has enlisted GFT, an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, and Sourced Group, an Amdocs Company, an AWS Premier Partner, to assist with the development and rollout of the bank’s new digitally native platform on AWS. Trust has also opted for the core banking services of AWS ISV Accelerate Partner Thought Machine. In addition to using AWS, Trust Bank is also taking advantage of AWS Marketplace, a curated digital software catalogue, to research, try out, acquire, and roll out a variety of third-party applications. In Singapore, Trust’s ability to provide novel banking services to its customers has been bolstered by this improved software-purchasing process.
“With changing customer preferences driving the rapid digitisation of ASEAN’s banking sector, leveraging advanced technologies offered by the public cloud is becoming an imperative. As the leading cloud platform for financial services institutions globally, AWS are proud to power Singapore’s first digital-native bank, Trust Bank, with our differentiating breadth and depth of services to help them delight customers and grow,” said Peter Murray, head of FSI, ASEAN at AWS.
“Using AWS, Trust Bank is able to innovate and iterate quickly to implement solutions like customised credit limits and an integrated loyalty program, which create engaging, intuitive, and rewarding consumer experiences. We are excited to continue supporting Trust Bank in their mission to reinvent digital banking with the highest level of security and scalability here in Singapore.”
Malaysia
Pos Malaysia Berhad (Pos Malaysia), Malaysia’s national postal and courier service provider, is betting on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to power its ambitious transformation strategy to expand its products and services, AWS revealed this week. As part of its corporate transformation, Pos Malaysia will shut down its on-premises data centres by 2023 and move the great bulk of its IT infrastructure to the most popular cloud computing service in the world.
By committing fully to AWS, Pos Malaysia can cut IT expenditures in half while improving the customer experience with innovative digital solutions focused on their needs. The 200-year-old company can now provide consumers with more efficient delivery thanks to these innovations. It has the largest last-mile reach in Malaysia, with access to more than 10 million addresses, and a retail network that includes more than 3,500 points of contact.
In 2020 and 2021, e-commerce in Malaysia rose significantly because of COVID-19 constraints, necessitating expansion on the part of courier and logistics companies to fulfil the rising demand for deliveries and to provide more reliability and convenience for clients. In order to provide better postal and logistics services, Pos Malaysia transferred 60 essential apps to AWS in June 2022. These applications include parcel tracking, point-of-sale retail, SAP, human resources, supply chain, and mail tracking.
In order to scale its workloads, Pos Malaysia will utilise Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers reliable, scalable cloud computing resources. Pos Malaysia would be able to better assist its clients through hassle-free delivery at busy times like sales promotions and holidays. To better understand consumer needs, discover delivery efficiencies, and enhance operations across the country, Pos Malaysia will create a consolidated data repository for an integrated data platform on AWS. Pos Malaysia, for instance, plans to use Amazon SageMaker, a service for creating, training and deploying machine-learning models for virtually any use-case, to construct data-driven models that forecast when demand will be high for delivery services and help Pos Malaysia allocate resources like vehicles and personnel to meet that demand.
“Pos Malaysia’s digital transformation with AWS is a great example of how a traditional last-mile logistics business can simplify, modernise, innovate, and scale. Using AWS, Pos Malaysia can capture growth opportunities in e-commerce as demand for online shopping accelerated across Southeast Asia during the pandemic. Pos Malaysia is delivering goods into the hands of customers in a cost-effective, efficient, and agile manner, especially during peak periods with high parcel volumes. We look forward to supporting Pos Malaysia’s growth and mission to enable more Malaysians to enjoy seamless e-commerce and delivery experiences,” said Eric Conrad, regional managing director of Worldwide Public Sector, ASEAN at AWS.
The Reason why ASEAN Companies Choose AWS
According to AWS, business has picked up significantly thanks to COVID, which has caused a sea of changes in how many customers perceive AWS. They witnessed first-hand how cloud computing has helped businesses not just weather the pandemic but flourish, taking advantage of novel business models and rapidly adjusting to the varying demands of their clientele.
“If you look at how we’ve supported customers, throughout the pandemic, I think it’s really crystallised the value proposition of the cloud, and nowhere more than in Southeast Asia where customers are using AWS to maintain connectivity to them to their end customers,” said Conor McNamara, Managing Director for ASEAN, AWS, as he explained why most businesses in the region, big or small, choose AWS products to help them boost their capabilities.
