The Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait Accelerates Data Queries by 7X with AWS and Cognizant

The Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait (BBK), a global bank that primarily services the Middle East, wanted to become a truly data-driven institution. As part of this effort, it aimed to modernize its technology to support advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). BBK partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to migrate to the cloud, where the bank could run high-volume analytics in near real time. In collaboration with AWS Premier Tier Services Partner Cognizant, BBK built a fully compliant data analytics platform as a service. This allowed the bank to bring revenue-driving, data-driven operations to its retail department, as well as generative AI-powered policy navigation. In just 18 months, the bank modernized its operations while maintaining regulatory compliance and is poised to further enhance customer experience with personalized solutions.

Headquartered in the kingdom of Bahrain, BBK is a financial institution with a global presence that offers a wide range of services, from retail banking to investment products. As part of its strategy to become a data-driven institution, BBK wanted to build a data analytics platform to leverage massive amounts of data more intentionally, improving customer experience, driving revenue, reducing costs, and mitigating risk. However, this wasn’t possible with its current data warehouse alone, which relied on legacy technology that did not support AI and ML—essential components for real-time processing and analysis.

To solve this, the bank knew it had to migrate to the cloud. And during a migration, BBK would need to consistently meet the strict regulatory mandates that Bahrain upholds for financial institutions—in addition to BBK’s own high standards for data privacy. “We needed to build a reliable and scalable data analytics platform using advanced cloud services, and it had to be fully compliant from day one,” said Dr. Aisha Bushager, head of data and analytics, at BBK. Because building an analytics platform would take a notable amount of time, the bank wanted to move to the cloud quickly.

After exploring options, BBK selected AWS as its cloud provider for several reasons. AWS has a cloud region with three Availability Zones in the Kingdom of Bahrain, which would provide consistent user experience and uptime. And because of the strong relationships AWS has with educational institutions in Bahrain, there are many high-caliber, local IT professionals who hold AWS certifications and training, improving the bank’s hiring pool. “While there are a lot of big names in the market, AWS is a pioneer when it comes to cloud services,” Dr. Bushager said. To move to the cloud as quickly, securely, and cost efficiently as possible, BBK participated in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). MAP applies an outcome-driven methodology that uses a three-phased framework, guided by an AWS support team. “MAP funding was generous and helped us offset some of the costs of migrating to the cloud,” Dr. Bushager said. “The proven MAP methodology also ensured a migration without downtime.”

To build its data analytics platform, BBK wanted to work with an experienced partner from the AWS Partner Network, and selected Cognizant, a global firm with a specialization in AI, ML, and data analytics. In addition to Cognizant’s analytics expertise, BBK was impressed with the many AWS competencies the firm holds. Together, Cognizant and BBK built a data lakehouse and analytics platform on the cloud as a proof of value, and set KPIs for use cases that aligned with business goals. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) serves as the foundation of its data lake. Using Amazon API Gateway, the platform receives the data and expands it to different services, while AWS Glue prepares data for analytics and ML projects. Amazon Redshift runs the warehouse that unifies and processes petabytes of data, optimizing it for near real-time AI.

BBK tested out the new platform for two priority use cases. First, the team, supported by Cognizant AI experts, focused on cross-selling and upselling the bank’s retail offerings. With Amazon SageMaker, the team trained an ML model to generate a list of customers who were eligible for cross-selling and upselling. The teams set parameters and fed it sample data to gauge the quality of recommendations. For the second use case, BBK built the bank’s first generative AI module, which simplifies how employees navigate large policy and procedure documents. These manuals can run thousands of pages long. Using Amazon Q, a generative AI-powered assistant that leverages BBK’s internal data, employees can ask questions in natural language and instantly receive summaries and answers based on the latest policies—making compliance processes easier and faster.

With the help of AWS and Cognizant, BBK was able to migrate to the cloud, build a robust data analytics platform, and successfully implement two use cases in just 18 months. A cloud-based platform has also led to major gains in the bank’s time-to-insights. “Compared to our on-premises solution, the speed of data queries is up to seven times faster on AWS,” said Dr. Bushager. “I am delighted that we chose AWS—its services and solutions are high quality and always up to date.” While BBK continues to expand its analytics use cases, the bank has already achieved successful outcomes from its cross-selling and upselling initiative. “The results were impressive—the ML model identified six times more prospects than those we manually identified,” Dr. Bushager said.

In addition to its effective modernization, BBK is fully compliant with an array of global security standards, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, information security requirements for the International Organization for Standardization, and regional data privacy regulations such as the Personal Data Protection Law. “Cognizant helped us build a solid, robust, and well-governed platform on AWS that meets high security standards,” said Dr. Bushager. “Cognizant also did an amazing job at teaching us along the way, which has added to our teams’ skillset.” BBK is already working with Cognizant to expand to a third use case, which will aim to personalize customer interactions—keeping with the bank’s goal of providing excellent customer experiences.