Customer Stories / Financial Services
2024
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Banking Innovator bunq Supports Growth, Strengthens Security Using AWS
Using AWS, digital bank bunq fortifies security and facilitates innovation using generative artificial intelligence. bunq also increases efficiency and scalability using managed services.
3x
greater support efficiency
90%
output accuracy
Near-instant
scale
Simplified
compliance
Overview
bunq was founded in 2012 to bring diversity of product, people, and business models to the traditional banking sector. Just over a decade after its launch, the neobank with a €1.65 billion valuation operates a banking license in the Netherlands and has more than 11 million users across Europe. As a fast-growing digital bank, it looked to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support expansion, protect data in line with European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and improve services with generative artificial intelligence (AI).
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Opportunity | Ramping up for Rapid Growth
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.
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AWS managed services and scale mean we can handle significant growth in a short time.”
Wessel Van
DevOps Team Lead, bunq
Solution | Setting Stringent Security Standards
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.
Outcome | Harnessing Generative AI for Continuous Service Innovation
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.”
About bunq
bunq was founded in 2012 by Ali Niknam, who set out to create the first truly user-centric bank. bunq’s goal is to make life easy for digital nomads, starting from the way they manage money—how they spend, save, budget, and invest.
AWS Services Used
Amazon Bedrock
Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities you need to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI.
AWS Security Hub
Use AWS Security Hub to automate security best practice checks, aggregate security alerts into a single place and format, and understand your overall security posture across all of your AWS accounts.
AWS Key Management Service
AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) lets you create, manage, and control cryptographic keys across your applications and AWS services.
AWS CloudHSM
AWS CloudHSM helps you meet corporate, contractual, and regulatory compliance requirements for data security.
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