Itaú Unibanco Automates Processes, Speeds AWS Account Creation from 5 Days to Just over 1 Hour

As part of its modernization and migration strategy, Itaú Unibanco wanted to give its various departments easy access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies. But creating accounts was a manual, time-consuming task that took around 5 days on average for each project. With support from AWS, the bank was able to automate the entire process, reducing account setup time to 1 hour and 20 minutes.

With 56 million clients and a presence in 18 countries, Itaú Unibanco is the largest financial institution in Latin America. Its extensive use of cloud computing has played a big part in the bank’s growth, In 2019, it set up its Cloud Engineering department, which provides cloud services to all Itaú Unibanco delivery functions, including channels, cards, loans, and negotiations.

“These departments modernize applications and create new banking products for customers. A new AWS account has to be set up for each product or migration,” says Bruno Conrado Santos, Cloud Engineering coordinator at Itaú Unibanco.

Douglas Johnny Garcia, also a Cloud Engineering coordinator, adds, “Our goal was to provide users with direct access to AWS, to make it easier for them to use cloud services.” “Our goal was to provide AWS services directly to the bank’s user areas.

At first, the platform was based on an internal agile project management tool that had a Service Desk feature used to make requests for opening an account. Since most of the process was manual, the service-level agreement to create a new account was 5 days. “There were several parts to the process that had to be completed in sequence. It took a long time,” says Garcia.

With use of AWS increasing at Itaú Unibanco, the Cloud Engineering team was almost entirely working on setting up new accounts. But not only was the process slow—it was also prone to error: 95% of accounts requested were subject to some sort of mistake. “We decided we needed to automate the entire process,” Garcia says.
 

“A work group was created with one of the first tasks being to migrate from a service desk tool to a self-service portal."

The resulting platform called the Vending Machine—reduced account creation time from five days to 30 hours. In this first evolution, the account creation time decreased from five days to 30 hours. It also reduced the incidence of errors. “At this point,” says Garcia, “we were able to scale the service a bit more, and then we began monitoring error rates.”

“We got the average setup time down to 14 hours,” adds Santos. But the team wanted to speed up the process even further. “Our aim was 3 hours,” he says.

“After trying a number of different approaches, we talked to AWS specialists and discovered that by running processes in parallel, we’d significantly accelerate the account creation process.” 

As part of its solution, the Cloud Engineering team uses the AWS Service Catalog to centrally manage deployment of IT services, applications, resources, and metadata, AWS CloudFormation to speed up cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code, and serverless, event-driven compute service AWS Lambda, In addition, it uses the AWS Step Functions visual workflow service, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)—a fully managed Pub/Sub service for A2A and A2P messaging—and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for managed message queuing. AWS Organizations lets the team create new AWS accounts at no additional charge.

“AWS helped us to get to our solution quicker, says Santos. “After 3 months of teamwork, we had our new AWS account creation process.”
 

Today, the Cloud Engineering department can create a new AWS account in just 1 hour and 20 minutes, compared to 5 days when the process was manual. It has automated 100% of the account creation process, changing the build from one to two accounts simultaneously, in addition to modernizing the event-based code.

The new architecture allows Garcia and his team to quickly plug any automation into the account baseline. “If, for example, we need to perform a backup, we can plug this into our automations. There are 44 steps in total to finalize account creation, and these can evolve as needed, in parallel. The result is, we’ve gone from spending 5 days to create an account to just over an hour," he says.

“We we’ve also significantly improved our error rates from 95% failure to around 5%. Today 95% of accounts are provisioned without incidents; the project’s success is testament to the way we worked together as a single team—both internally and with AWS.”