SZT makes its financial services safer and more efficient on AWS

To serve customers more rapidly, financial service institutions globally are exploring business opportunities through using the Internet and digitalization. SZTUS is operating in multiple countries to provide efficient digital solutions for international financial services and to meet the financial loan needs of the public. And SZT is the only R&D center of SZTUS.

Financial services are a fiercely competitive market, and market participants not only need to consider customer service efficiency and experience, but also fulfill strict policy regulations, data privacy protection, and compliance requirements. Internet security threats are becoming increasingly complex. In the process of technology research and development and solution implementation, SZT always takes security and compliance as its first priority, while continuing to optimize and improve the security baseline of the business. Faced with the continuous growth of a series of applications such as customer relationship maintenance, credit services, and risk control, it needed to quickly find an industry-proven, mature solution to provide more refined permission control and security protection for the business.

In addition to security challenges, SZT is also looking to better improve customer acquisition efficiency and post loan service quality. Wolf Lai, CTO of SZT, said, "Our call centers in Costa Rica and the Philippines use traditional VoIP methods with relatively limited functionality, so the development team has to spend a lot of effort on integration and development to achieve CRM integration and recording of agent service data. However, these simple data collections are difficult to provide business insights for agent managers. We hope to further improve the efficiency of call personnel and introduce AI and machine learning into this scenario.

The financial service informatization solutions provided by SZT serve multiple countries and regions. Enterprises need a global cloud platform to provide stable cloud services and efficient, low latency data transmission. Financial services have extremely strict requirements for information security and privacy protection. SZT also requires cloud service providers to have complete security and compliance certification. After evaluating multiple service providers, AWS's advantages in compliance, cost-effectiveness, and elastic expansion became its optimal choice.

Database is the core application in financial scenarios. For SZT, Amazon Aurora not only provides compatibility with MySQL and PostgreSQL, but also built-in security, automatic multi-region replication, and multi-service integration capabilities. It is suitable for helping enterprises build more secure and reliable global databases and enabling them to achieve better disaster tolerance capabilities. “Good compatibility allows us to easily complete database migration, and Amazon Aurora can also provide support for applications with multiple availability zones, achieving a 99.99% SLA,” said Lai said. "This is also the availability level we promised our customers. That means they can expect a more stable online financial service experience.”

Gaining real-time search and analysis of data also directly affects business efficiency, customer credit service cycle, and customer experience. SZT uses Amazon OpenSearch Service, a hosted service, to analyze business and operational data, providing the required results to financial related businesses. The technology experience consistent with open-source ElasticSearch allows its technical team to get started faster and eliminates the operational pressure brought about by self-managed deployment. At the same time, it integrates capabilities such as authentication, authorization, encryption, auditing, and supervision into analysis to enhance business security.

SZT has also collaborated with AWS to improve the omnichannel customer interaction. By introducing Amazon Connect services to replace its VoIP call center solution, SZT’s call center has truly become a module driving business development. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to assist human agents to complete customer service more efficiently.

In July 2022, SZT worked closely with AWS and an AWS partner to migrate its financial services database from a self-built system on its previous cloud platform to AWS in one month. It also adopted more cloud hosting services to support the business. 

The AWS professional service team has also provided a series of security assessment services and optimization recommendations for security optimization, using Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication system for achieving fine-grained system identity management. By establishing a unified visibility of security events through the Amazon Security Hub, Amazon Secrets Manager, Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon Detective, SZT has built a multi-account architecture with Amazon Organizations and Amazon Control Tower. This provides detailed security assessments, fine-grained access control, and auditing for the financial services product architecture. By creating a secure foundation that can support global and multi-regional business development, its overall safety protection capability has increased three-fold.

After migrating from its previous self-built business system database to AWS, SZT can fully utilize the scalability and enterprise level performance provided by Amazon Aurora cloud hosted relational databases, as well as Amazon OpenSearch Service hosted distributed search and analysis suites. This helps it provide more efficient support for financial services businesses. "Restricted by hardware limitation, it will take 8-12 hours to clean, transfer and query billions of data on the self-built platform. It only takes 10 minutes to complete this on AWS. The performance optimization has exceeded our expectations," Lai said.

By replacing traditional VoIP call centers with Amazon Connect, SZT can not only achieve deeper integration between customer contact and business systems within two months, but also use AWS AI capabilities to convert data into actionable insights, promoting business optimization.

Looking ahead, SZT plans to further integrate its business system with Amazon Connect to continuously optimize the customer interaction experience. Its technical team will also gradually transform the infrastructure to Kubernetes container technology stack based on AWS, to implement the enterprise's overall DevOps automation development and implementation strategy. SZT will also collaborate with AWS to expand its applications in the financial and social media field, using artificial intelligence and machine learning in core systems, such as anti-fraud and credit evaluation, to provide customers with high-quality, intelligent financial technology.

Chengdu Si-Zhao Technology Co., Ltd. (SZT) was established in 2018 and is a wholly foreign-owned company that has obtained national high-tech enterprise certification. Located in Tianfu Software Park, Chengdu High tech Zone, it provides technical support to fraternal companies from around the world, including the United States, the Philippines, Egypt, Costa Rica, etc. Its business scope covers fields such as financial technology, software research and development, risk control management, and artificial intelligence. Focusing on multiple businesses such as loans, investments, credit risk ratings, and customer service in the US market, it provides efficient digital solutions for the group's international financial services.