Standard Bank of South Africa is to adopt a cloud-first approach to its business, contracting with Amazon Web Services for a mass-migration of its IT architecture in a bid to drive its digital transformation strategy.
The bank has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider with the intention of porting its production workloads, including its customer facing platforms and strategic core banking applications to the cloud.
The move to AWS will take place across all business units, including personal banking, wealth, corporate investment banking, and insurance.
Standard Bank says it will take advantage of a number of ancillary AWS services, including Amazon SageMaker, to advance fraud detection and launch new business initiatives, such as machine learning-based advisor capabilities that will help customers make more informed financial decisions.
As part of the move, an AWS Cloud Center of Excellence will be established within the bank, featuring a dedicated team to drive the migration to the cloud and building AWS training and certification programs to up-skill all employees.
Sim Tshabalala, group CEO of Standard Bank, says: “AWS Cloud technology will create a springboard for Standard Bank Group, helping us to rapidly roll out our digitisation and data strategy to better cater to customers whose needs are constantly evolving. The combination of AWS’s rapid agility and high levels of security, combined with Standard Bank’s customer obsession and desire to constantly raise the bar, will allow us to build Africa’s financial services organisation of the future and to be positioned as more than a bank.”