AWS Case Study: Bankinter

Bankinter, founded in June 1965 as a Spanish industrial bank through a joint venture by Banco de Santander and Bank of America, is currently listed among the top six banks in Spain. More than 60% of Bankinter transactions are performed through remote channels, and 46% of those through the Internet. Bankinter has been online since 1996, when they pioneered the offering of real-time stock market operations, and today Bankinter.com and Bankinter broker continue to lead the European banking industry in online financial operations.

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 their clients. “This requires high computational power,” says Bankinter Director of New Technologies Pedro Castillo. “We need to execute at least 400,000 simulations to get realistic results.”

Bankinter uses the “flexibility and power” of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to execute these simulations, subdividing processes through a grid of Amazon EC2 instances and executing simulations in parallel on several Amazon EC2 instances, “to obtain the result in a very effective time,” according to Castillo.

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 brought average time-to-solution down from 23 hours to 20 minutes and dramatically reduced processing, with the ability to reduce even further when required. AWS also allowed Bankinter to adapt from a big batch process to a parallel paradigm through the Amazon EC2 system that was not previously possible.

“The AWS platform was a good fit for its unlimited and flexible computational power to our risk-simulation process requirements,” says Castillo. “With AWS, we now have the power to decide how fast we want to obtain simulation results, and, more importantly, we have the ability to run simulations not possible before due to the large amount of infrastructure required.”

Bankinter plans to expand their use of AWS for future applications and business units.

To learn more, visit http://www.bankinter.com/ This link will launch in a new browser window or tab. .