Banking Innovator bunq Supports Growth, Strengthens Security Using AWS

With rising demand for its digital banking offering across Europe, bunq migrated its infrastructure to AWS for increased scale and easier maintenance. Using managed services, bunq quickly made productivity gains, requiring fewer resources to run IT and helping the team focus on the business.

“Using AWS, we don’t need to buy new hardware, and management is simpler,” says Wessel Van, DevOps team lead at bunq. “Scaling is nearly instant.” In 2023, bunq’s user base grew to 11 million, and with planned expansion to the United Kingdom and United States, the company is sure its infrastructure is fit for the challenge. “AWS managed services and scale mean we can handle significant growth in a short time,” says Van.

Protecting data is a top priority, and using AWS helps bunq comply with GDPR and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). With AWS CloudHSM, which lets organizations manage single-tenant hardware security modules on AWS, bunq can control keys for card payments.

The neobank can quickly verify PCI DSS compliance using AWS Security Hub for automated security checks and centralized alerts. And with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)—which supports creation and control of cryptographic keys—it can encrypt user data in one click. “There are many AWS tools that make compliance simpler,” says Van.

bunq has been making life easy for its users from day one, so it was quick to see the potential to improve the banking experience with generative AI. The neobank uses Amazon Bedrock—a fully managed service to build and scale generative AI applications with foundation models—for several use cases, including summarizing new user data with large language models. Generative AI removes the need for agents to process documents manually, so onboarding is now faster for new bunq users.

Using Amazon Bedrock, bunq has tripled user support process efficiency, helping enhance satisfaction, while maintaining high-quality output with over 90 percent accuracy. The best part for bunq is that the scaleup can accelerate innovation without compromising security. As Ali el Hassouni, head of data and AI at bunq, says, “Implementing generative AI is simple because the data resides on AWS, so our sensitive data doesn’t leave the virtual private cloud.”