AWS for Industries
Sterling Bank Drives Innovation in Banking with VMware Cloud on AWS
The banking sector continues to see tremendous advances in digital customer engagement and automation technologies, which have created many opportunities for the industry. Sterling National Bank, a $30 billion financial institution based in northeast US, is using this opportunity to expand into the digital sector and streamline its customer banking experience. Their vision includes an innovative single-point-of-contact digital service that interacts with any device.
To make its vision a reality, Sterling worked with AWS Premier Consulting Partner Deloitte to migrate to a cloud solution with modern infrastructure and security controls. Together, the team decided that VMware Cloud on AWS was the fastest and easiest way to migrate to the cloud and enable an agile infrastructure. “We took a very structured approach in choosing VMware Cloud on AWS,” explains Brendan Welter SVP, Chief Security and Technology Officer, Sterling National Bank. “We considered time to market, time to value, knowledge of our colleagues, and our engineers’ ability to control the structure and framework. We were pleasantly surprised that VMware Cloud on AWS not only delivered, it enhanced our structure, framework, cybersecurity, and risk control.”
Integrating the AWS Nitro system with VMware Cloud on AWS
In 12 months, Sterling moved its applications—including its core banking systems—to the AWS Cloud and closed five of its datacenters. The bank experienced significant savings in time and money and increased agility in meeting new customer demands. “VMware Cloud on AWS let us lift and shift our more complex systems, like Fiserve, directly to the AWS Cloud without a lot of changes,” says Welter. “We quickly benefitted from the cost savings, productivity, resilience, and agility of the cloud.”
By integrating the VMware software-defined datacenter (SDDC) with the AWS Nitro system, an underlying platform for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Sterling enhanced performance of selected applications by 40 percent due to lower latency. Sterling also reduced service-related incidents by 50 percent. The bank had an aggressive goal to automate all its back-office processes to optimize daily workflow. With everything connected, stable and resilient with VMware Cloud on AWS, back-office automation is nearly 100 percent complete.
Enabling modernization and advanced solutions
VMware Cloud on AWS let Sterling switch its focus from managing on-premises datacenters to transforming its business. The bank is using the high throughput, low latency connection between the VMware Cloud SDDC on AWS to improve business functions and innovate. They can modernize using more than 200 Amazon Web Services (AWS) native services, including analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) services.
The connection let the bank provide advanced solutions such as conversational AI to better service its customers. They developed a proprietary conversational AI solution running on native AWS services that uses automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding to resolve customer calls quickly. After introducing the AI solution, Sterling decreased its call center volume by 50 percent.
Conclusion
In banking, customer trust is difficult to earn and easy to lose. “Ensuring we don’t lose the trust of our customers with a reliable platform that we can count on is a high priority,” says Welter. “VMware Cloud on AWS gives us and our customers that trust.”
The VMware Cloud on AWS technology solution improves operational efficiency and enables banks to create better customer experiences.
To learn more, we recommend you review these additional resources: