AWS Case Study: Bankinter
Bankinter was founded in June, 1965 as a Spanish industrial bank through a joint venture by Banco de Santander and Bank of America. It is currently listed among the top ten banks in Spain. Bankinter has provided online banking services since 1996, when they pioneered the offering of real-time stock market operations. More than 60% of Bankinter transactions are performed through remote channels; 46% of those transactions are through the Internet. Today Bankinter.com and Bankinter brokerage services continue to lead the European banking industry in online financial operations.
The Business Challenges
Bankinter uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an integral part of their credit-risk simulation application, developing complex algorithms to simulate diverse scenarios in order to evaluate the financial health of Bankinter clients. "This requires high computational power,” says Bankinter Director of Technological Innovation, Javier Roldán. “We need to perform at least 5,000,000 simulations to get realistic results.”
Why Amazon Web Services
Bankinter uses the flexibility and power of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to perform these simulations, subdividing processes through a grid of Amazon EC2 instances and implementing simulations in parallel on several Amazon EC2 instances to obtain the result in a very effective time period.
Bankinter used Java to develop their application and the Amazon Software Development Kit (SDK) to automate the provisioning process of AWS elements. Through the use of AWS, Bankinter decreased the average time-to-solution from 23 hours to 20 minutes and dramatically reduced processing, with the ability to reduce even further when required. Amazon EC2 also allowed Bankinter to adapt from a big batch process to a parallel paradigm, which was not previously possible. Costs were also dramatically reduced with this cloud-based approach.
The Business Benefits
Bankinter plans to expand their use of AWS for future applications and business units. “The AWS platform, with its unlimited and flexible computational power, is a good fit for our risk-simulation process requirements,” says Roldán. “With AWS, we now have the power to decide how fast we want to obtain simulation results. More important, we have the ability to run simulations that were not possible before due to the large amount of infrastructure required.”
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Added August 21, 2012
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