Bank al Etihad Deploys Blockchain Service 10x Faster Using AWS

Using AWS, Bank al Etihad has the agility to deploy new services—including its blockchain-based document authentication platform—10 times faster. The bank provides financial services to consumers and businesses in Jordan. It uses AWS technologies, including AWS KMS, AWS CloudFormation, and Amazon RDS.

Bank al Etihad has provided services to consumers and businesses in Jordan for more than 40 years. Like many banks, it had to become more agile in an increasingly competitive market. Customers expect easy-to-use digital services, and financial technology startups have disrupted the industry with their ability to innovate quickly.

In 2017, Bank al Etihad began using Amazon Web Services (AWS) and adopted DevOps as part of a modernization initiative to get services to customers quicker. One of the most important projects that the bank was developing was Cronica, a blockchain-based document authentication standard.

In banking, security comes first. Convincing senior management to move workloads off premises and onto the cloud was not easy. However, the native AWS security features were crucial to help Aram Yegenian, the bank’s DevOps director get buy-in. Using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), for example, allowed Bank al Etihad to continue creating and keeping its own data-encryption master keys on premises.

Rather than lift-and-shift, the bank chose to re-architect apps from scratch in the cloud, using services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Elasticsearch Service.

The bank’s data science team takes encrypted data from databases using Amazon Kinesis and persists that in Amazon Redshift where colleagues can analyze reports for sales trends and predict user behavior in near real time without revealing private data. The reports also give teams the confidence to tune new services, which improves turnaround times and revenue.

Yegenian says, “AWS gives us pre-built, highly available components that are backed up to the second. Achieving that on premises is possible, but it takes much more time, effort, and money. Using AWS, our procurement cycle is 20 times faster than the on-premises process, and capital expenditure is 50 percent lower. I can allocate highly available services to apps in AWS that I simply can’t afford to do on premises.”

Cronica became a key test of the bank’s agility. “We had backing to roll out this new authentication standard,” says Yegenian, “but doing so efficiently was the challenge.” The company found the answer in AWS CloudFormation, which lets customer banks deploy Cronica using templates.

Yegenian says, “We could develop the service quickly because we were using pre-built cloud services. Deployment using AWS CloudFormation is more consistent and at least 10 times faster than using customer-managed virtual machines. Adopting AWS has played a major part in our ability to innovate.”