Case Studies for Financial Services
8 Securities
8 Securities accomplishes its mission of reinventing investing in Hong Kong by providing a Trading Portal where users have access to resources that enable them to learn from and exchange ideas with like-minded investors. To maintain a cost-effective, reliable, scalable, flexible computing platform, the company uses several services from AWS, including Amazon EC2 with Elastic IP Addresses, Amazon EBS, Amazon VPC, and Elastic Load Balancing.
Aon
Aon Securities Inc. (ASI), a financial services provider, needed high-powered computing to run financial simulations to value and manage insurance retirement products. The company turned to AWS to run its financial simulation platform to reduce simulation time by leveraging GPU optimized instances. As a result, ASI has been able to lower the calculation and total reporting process time from 10 days to 10 minutes.
Bankinter
Bankinter, a leading provider of online banking services in Spain, uses AWS as an integral part of their credit-risk simulation application. The application uses complex algorithms to perform 5,000,000 simulations. Using AWS, Bankinter was able to reduce the average time-to-solution from 23 hours to 20 minutes.
Capital One
Capital One is using AWS as a central part of its technology strategy. As a result, the bank plans to reduce its data center footprint from eight to three by 2018. Capital One is one of the nation’s largest banks and offers credit cards, checking and savings accounts, auto loans, rewards, and online banking services for consumers and businesses. It is using or experimenting with nearly every AWS service to develop, test, build, and run its most critical workloads, including its new flagship mobile-banking application. Capital One selected AWS for its security model and for the ability to provision infrastructure on the fly, the elasticity to handle purchasing demands at peak times, its high availability, and its pace of innovation.
Coinbase
Coinbase is the world's most popular bitcoin wallet, facilitating bitcoin transactions in 190 countries. The organization runs its global bitcoin exchanges, wallets, and an analytical insight pipeline on AWS. Using AWS, Coinbase has grown to support 3 million global bitcoin users and processes and can analyze 1 TB of data each day for better insight into its business.
DTCC
Robert Palatnick, Chief Technology Architect at DTCC, describes how the centralized clearinghouse that processes 100 million transactions per day is transforming trade processing and analytics using AWS. DTCC is all in on AWS, running more than 20 workloads in a regulated environment that demands resilience, secure storage, and industry-wide collaboration.
FINRA
By migrating to AWS, FINRA — the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority— has created a flexible platform that can adapt to changing market dynamics while providing its analysts with the tools to interactively query multi-petabyte data sets. FINRA is dedicated to investor protection and market integrity. It regulates one critical part of the securities industry – brokerage firms doing business with the public in the United States. To respond to rapidly changing market dynamics, FINRA moved about 90 percent of its data volumes to Amazon Web Services, using AWS to capture, analyze, and store a daily influx of 37 billion records.
Intuit
Intuit provides financial and tax preparation software for small businesses, accountants, and individuals worldwide. The company began using AWS to host TurboTax AnswerXchange, an application that was only active during tax season, reducing its cost by a factor of six. Today, Intuit runs 33 applications on AWS and plans to move the rest of them to the cloud in the coming years. Using AWS enables Intuit to reach new markets, speed development, and better serve its customers.
JKOS
By using AWS, JKOS cut the IT costs of launching its business by 90 percent and reduced IT administration costs by 83 percent. JKOS has developed the JKOS app for multiple services including food delivery, taxi bookings and payments. The company supports its apps through the AWS Cloud using Amazon EC2 instances for compute, Amazon RDS for warehousing customer and vendor data, and Amazon S3 for storing images.
Mambu
Using AWS, Mambu helped one of its customers launch the United Kingdom’s first cloud-based bank, and the company is now on track for tenfold growth, giving it a competitive edge in the fast-growing fintech sector. Mambu is an all-in-one SaaS banking platform for managing credit and deposit products quickly, simply, and affordably. The company uses services including AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon EC2, and Amazon RDS to run its entire infrastructure.
msg global
The 600 consultants at msg global solutions deliver expertise to clients worldwide in the insurance industry. Having reached the performance limits of its on-premises infrastructure, the company chose AWS to run SAP for Insurance solutions. Processes are now optimized, services are delivered faster, and the company anticipates it will save $500,000 over the next five years.
National Bank of Canada
National Bank of Canada’s Global Equity Derivatives Group (GED) uses AWS to process and analyze hundreds of terabytes of financial data, conduct data manipulations in one minute instead of days, and scale and optimize its operations. GED provides stock-trading solutions and services to a range of organizations throughout the world. The organization runs its data analysis using the TickVault platform on the AWS Cloud.
NuBank
NuBank, a Brazilian financial services startup, offers its customers a no-fee, low-interest credit card service. The company is using AWS to host its mobile application and credit card processing platform. By using AWS, NuBank reduced its time to market and is now able to launch customer-facing features with ease.
Pacific Life Insurance
Pacific Life Insurance provides financial services and products to individuals, businesses, and pension plans. The company turned to AWS for its hybrid IT strategy, using the AWS cloud in combination with data centers in California and Nebraska to run actuarial workloads used to set insurance pricing and create new product offerings. Using AWS, Pacific Life can quickly scale its compute capacity with less cost and IT overhead compared to adding new hardware to its own data centers.
Robinhood
Robinhood’s lean staff, including just two devops people, used AWS to create a massively scalable securities trading app with strong built-in security and compliance features that supported hundreds of thousands of users at launch. Robinhood is a startup offering no-fee securities trading. The company uses AWS to operate its online business, deliver and update its mobile trading app, securely store customer information and trading data, and perform business analytics.
Simple
Simple is an online bank that offers its customers tools to better understand and manage their finances. The bank built its online banking platform on AWS while meeting payment card industry (PCI) data security standard (DSS) compliance. Using AWS, Simple can automate processes that once took months to complete and focus on its customer service rather than managing IT infrastructure.
Solarisbank
Berlin-based Solarisbank is Europe’s leading Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform for business customers across all industries. As a bank with a full German banking license, Solarisbank enables other companies to offer their own financial services. In 2020, the FinTech has gone all-in on AWS. Watch Solarisbank share their migration journey to AWS, how their platform is evolving, and how they operate securely and in-compliance using AWS.
Starling Bank
Starling Bank is one of UK’s leading fintech startups, and a successful mobile-first disruptor in the retail banking market. Since launching in 2014, Starling Bank has used AWS to build a convenient, transparent, and mobile-first service without sacrificing security, scalability or cost-effectiveness. Using AWS services including AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS, Starling has achieved a fast, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure which enables seamless, compliant functionality updates.
Stripe
Since 2011, Stripe has delivered its PCI-compliant payment platform entirely on AWS, relying on the security best practices as well as easy auditability of the AWS platform. Stripe wants to make it easier than ever for developers to process payments on their web and mobile applications. Using AWS provides Stripe with access to a world-class infrastructure that helps it scale seamlessly and increase developer productivity.