Krom Bank Accelerates Digital Banking Innovation in Indonesia with AWS Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, has announced that PT Krom Bank Indonesia Tbk (Krom Bank), a member of Kredivo Group, has launched the Krom digital banking service.

In Indonesia, 74% of the population remain unbanked or under-banked with little to no access to traditional banking services. This significant financial inclusion gap, which stems from various socioeconomic barriers such as geographical remoteness and low financial literacy presents opportunities for FinTech innovations such as mobile money and digital banking service.

Krom Bank’s vision is to serve these underbanked customers with personalised services through its application and empowers the younger generation to achieve financial independence through responsible saving and smart financial planning. The bank offers customers deposit with attractive interest rates, accessible within its fast application and protected with robust security measures enabled by AWS.

By building on AWS, Krom Bank gains agility to rapidly experiment and iterate, producing innovative new services for underbanked Indonesians to improve their financial well-being using managed services and generative artificial intelligence (generative AI), including e-KYC, facial recognition, and personalised services. Krom Bank is the first Indonesian bank to utilise the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region to meet data residency regulatory requirements.

Krom Bank Taps AWS to Serve Fast-Growing Customer Base

The bank built its database using Amazon Aurora, a fully managed and highly scalable database service that ensures uninterrupted application access for its fast-growing customer base. It has achieved key performance indicators and milestones demonstrating strong user adoption and engagement. It uses Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service, to add new mobile banking products like eKYC capabilities to its mobile app. This allows customers to open a bank account through the applications 10-20 times faster than the manual process in a physical branch.

The bank also uses Amazon Rekognition, a fully managed Machine Learning service that makes it easy to add image and video analysis for banking services applications using deep learning technology, to identify customers using mobile selfies, making logging into the app easy and secure. This solution also enables customers to submit documents digitally to open accounts in under three minutes from anywhere there is mobile reception.

Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service for machine learning, is used to train and validate their in-house generative AI models. These models improve the customer experience by analyzing their behavior when using Krom Bank’s application. For example, the behavioural analysis can enhance security by identifying unusual patterns in transaction data that may indicate fraudulent activity. Generative AI can adapt to emerging threats and provide robust fraud detection mechanisms.

“AWS provides the flexibility we need to rapidly evolve our suite of financially-inclusive mobile banking services, making them engaging and easy to use,” said Anton Hermawan, President Director at Krom Bank. “Cloud technology helps us deliver innovative and secure financial services to Indonesia’s youth and previously underserved part of Indonesia’s population. Krom Bank benefits from being hosted in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region, enabling us to meet local regulatory requirements while serving end-users with lower latency. We look forward to continued robust growth with AWS.”

Exploring Generative AI Solutions by AWS

Krom Bank plans to continue innovating to enhance its customer experience including chatbot and virtual assistance by exploring AWS’s generative AI services, including Amazon Bedrock, the easiest way to build and scale generative AI applications using foundation models.

To further accelerate its digital transformation journey, Krom Bank leverages SaaS cloud banking platform and AWS Advanced Technology Partner, Mambu. Mambu acts as the core ledger, powering Krom Bank’s lending products. Krom Bank is the first digital bank in Indonesia scaling their operations in the cloud on Mambu. By operating on Mambu, underpinned by AWS, Krom Bank has an agile, scalable, and secure infrastructure to support its present needs and future growth.

To complement the integration of AWS cloud services, Krom Bank leverages AWS’s Training and Certification programs to upskill its workforce with in-demand cloud skills in the areas of development, architecture, DevOps, and security. These skills enable the bank’s developers to accelerate innovation for customers and help the bank evolve with customer demand for new digital services.

“The financial services industry in Indonesia is evolving to serve a growing population of new, previously underbanked users with cloud technology, which lies at the heart of any digital transformation program,” said Anthony Amni, Country Leader, Indonesia, at AWS. “Krom Bank innovates at a rapid pace to develop intuitive banking services on AWS that make managing finances easy and engaging. Removing the complexity from banking is critical for many mobile app users in Indonesia, and the bank achieves this with the agility, security, and availability of the cloud.”

By leveraging AWS’s cloud services and generative AI capabilities, Krom Bank is well-positioned to drive financial inclusion in Indonesia and provide secure, scalable, and innovative digital banking services. The Bank’s cloud-native approach enables rapid innovation that empowers the nation’s youth and underbanked populations with convenient access to financial services and promotes economic empowerment as Krom Bank continues its digital transformation journey on AWS.