PT Bank Hibank Indonesia Modernizes Cross-Border Payments with ASEAN’s First Alliance Cloud on AWS

In Indonesia's rapidly evolving banking and financial services sector, traditional banks are increasingly shifting toward digital services to meet changing customer expectations. For hibank, maintaining competitiveness in this landscape while serving its MSME clientele required modernizing its cross-border payment infrastructure.

hibank’s previous on-premises infrastructure presented several operational challenges. Hardware security modules had to be replaced during every major system upgrade. Following installation, a team of hibank staff were still required to perform regular routine maintenance.

Additionally, with its MSME customers having increased demand for cross-border transactions monthly, hibank needed faster payment processing to remain competitive in Indonesia's digital banking landscape.

The bank needed a solution that would improve cost efficiency, reliability, and availability for cross-border payments while reducing vendor dependencies and eliminating manual maintenance. Any modernized infrastructure also needed to meet Indonesia's strict banking regulations while maintaining robust data protection for international transactions.

After migrating to AWS using Swift Alliance Cloud, hibank eliminated costly hardware upgrades, reducing TCO by 50 percent. Without hardware procurement delays, the bank improved its time-to-market for new services, allowing the bank to respond faster to market opportunities. The implementation took just 1.5 months, demonstrating AWS's ability to help hibank modernize while maintaining operational continuity.

hibank leveraged Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides  secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload, to power its Swift Alliance Cloud environment. This flexible infrastructure eliminated the need for upfront hardware investments and allowed the bank to start small and then scale up based on demand, improving operational efficiency while reducing costs. Moreover, since Amazon EC2 is a fully managed service, the bank’s IT team no longer needs to perform manual maintenance and can focus on higher-value tasks elsewhere.

hibank also utilized AWS Transit Gateway, a networking service, to connect its virtual private clouds, AWS accounts, and existing on-premises networks to a single gateway. With AWS Transit Gateway, hibank has a simplified and centralized network architecture, which helps the bank maintain up to 99.99 percent reliability for its cross-border payment system.

Finally, with AWS Marketplace, a curated digital storefront for companies to find, try, buy, deploy, and manage solutions from AWS Partners, hibank found vSRX Next Generation Virtual Firewall (vSRX), a virtual firewall that provides scalable, secure protection across private, public, and hybrid clouds. With vSRX, hibank eliminated its hardware dependencies and streamlined system upgrades. The bank's IT team no longer needed to replace physical security modules during major upgrades, reducing operational complexity and costs.

Building on the successful migration of its Swift Alliance infrastructure to AWS, hibank is advancing its digital transformation journey with several strategic initiatives.

The bank is developing a comprehensive data lake that will serve as a Single Source of Truth. The goal is to achieve better business insights, support future artificial intelligence capabilities, and help hibank deliver more personalized and efficient banking services to its MSME customers.

The bank is also exploring additional modernization projects, including implementing zero-trust security architecture and enhancing its fraud prevention and risk management systems. These initiatives will further strengthen hibank's position as an innovative digital bank in Indonesia's competitive financial services landscape.

“The migration to AWS reduced our total cost of ownership by 50% by eliminating expensive hardware upgrades and manual maintenance. With greater cost efficiency and scalability on AWS,  we can start small with specific use cases and scale based on success, helping us build a more agile and competitive digital bank for Indonesia's MSME sector,” said Nugroho Wahyu Dwiyono, infrastructure head at PT Bank Hibank Indonesia.