VPBank Fuels Digital Transformation and Enhances Cloud Skills with AWS

Established in 1993, VPBank is a prominent retail and commercial bank in Vietnam. The financial services provider aims to rank among the top three banks in Vietnam and the 100 largest banks in Asia by 2025 as part of its five-year development strategy.

A key part of this strategy is transforming VPBank into a digital, multi-purpose financial services provider capable of serving Vietnam's growing economy. The cloud has been essential to this process, accelerating service development and allowing the bank to meet customer needs swiftly. Moreover, by leveraging the cloud, the business aims to automate banking tasks for improved efficiency and gain valuable data insights that legacy applications cannot provide.

VPBank adopted Amazon Web Services (AWS) to implement its cloud strategy. To fully leverage AWS, the bank recognized the need for organizational changes. Employees needed to develop a cloud mindset and enhance their evolving skillsets with AWS expertise to drive innovation. The bank collaborated with AWS Professional Services for their expertise and established an employee upskilling program to mitigate risks during cloud migration. The AWS Skills Guild framework was used to develop and launch a customized cloud enablement initiative across the organization, facilitating VPBank's cloud-first approach and organizational transformation.

VPBank engaged AWS Professional Services to guide and supplement its IT team with experienced AWS consultants. Together, they migrated workloads to AWS and modernized them to run natively on the cloud for greater scalability and cost optimization. The AWS consultants provided on-the-job training to VPBank’s staff, covering migration methodology and processes. They also delivered migration runbooks, implementation playbooks, and assessment questionnaires, equipping VPBank with the necessary foundation to manage cloud migrations independently.

With the assistance of AWS, the bank successfully migrated 28 VPBank applications to AWS within 11 months. Subsequently, VPbank team optimized the bank’s workloads, enhancing performance. They also facilitated the creation of an AWS Disaster Recovery infrastructure, implementing AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery for 78 critical workloads. The AWS team ensured a smooth transition by providing ongoing on-the-job training and thorough handover process as the project milestones were reached.

The migration of VPBank’s Phoenix risk management system to AWS has led to remarkable productivity improvements. Phoenix, a system critical for calculating risk figures, was refactored to take full advantage of AWS's capabilities. Post-migration, the processing time for complex tasks that previously took 2 hours was reduced to just 20 minutes, and report synthesis time was slashed from 6 hours to 1 hour—both reflecting a six-fold efficiency increase.

Additionally, the migration of VPBank’s SAP/HANA ERP system resulted in performance improvements of up to 70%, significantly enhancing overall operational efficiency. In the Financial Markets & Transaction Banking (FMTB) division, the migration of Corporate Bond Management System (CBMS) and Foreign Exchange Front Office (FXFO) systems to AWS provided greater cost transparency. By utilizing AWS tools like Budget, Billing, and CUR, the bank now tracks daily expenses, automatically detecting unusual costs for timely action and better financial management. These systems, critical for corporate bond and foreign exchange management, have seen enhanced functionality, aiding VPBank’s financial operations.

To sustain the momentum of its cloud transformation, VPBank partnered with AWS Training and Certification. The objective was to cultivate in-house AWS skills, drive cloud fluency, and adopt a new approach to developing and deploying solutions across the business and for its customers.

As such, the bank conducted an AWS Learning Needs Analysis to tailor AWS training to the needs of both technical and non-technical personnel. Then, working closely with AWS trainers and AWS Skills Guild team, the bank facilitated interactive sessions on AWS's Working Backwards innovation methodology, Cloud Essentials, Data Analytics, and Architecting. These workshops aimed to provide participants with a comprehensive understanding of cloud computing principles and the rapid iterative approach that drives innovation within the company.

The bank established a Cloud Center of Excellence and designed a three-year AWS training program based on the AWS Skills Guild framework, which included foundational, intermediate, and advanced AWS courses so both technical and non-technical employees of VPBank could learn about the cloud. The AWS training program also included AWS GameDay events, AWS Hands-on Tutorials, and AWS Champion Sharing events for employees to learn from each other. With AWS services continually evolving, VPBank hosted monthly AWS Cloud Fluency workshops to keep its team up to speed with the latest cloud developments.

"Adopting the AWS Skills Guild framework and launching our own enablement program called LevelUp was a logical step," said Tran Thi Diep Anh, CHRO of VPBank. "It helps us improve our entire organization and fosters enthusiasm for our learning objectives. This initiative addresses the challenges of organizing training in a structured yet expedited manner."

The bank adopted Instance Scheduler on AWS for its non-production environments, resulting in optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud costs and a 20% reduction in Amazon Relational Database Service costs. Additionally, they optimized performance scaling efficiency, increasing virtual server elasticity from 6% to 42% and database elasticity from 4% to 20%."

“AWS helped us transform as quickly as possible. We could learn from the best and enable our people,” says Wong Kok Seng Augustine, CIO of VPBank. He also adds, “We delivered projects ahead of schedule and adopted FinOps best practices to effectively manage cloud workload costs.”

Through the engagement of AWS experts and training, the bank has accelerated the development cycles of new banking services. “By collaborating with AWS, relying on their expertise in migrating our workloads and training our employees, we can take full advantage of AWS to accelerate the development of digital banking services and create an innovation-driven culture across the organization,” says Luu Thi Thao, Standing DCEO, VPBank.

The collaboration has also ensured that VPBank’s development follows security best practices in line with the changing worldwide regulatory environment for financial services providers. As part of its enhanced security strategy, VPBank is now prepared to migrate critical client servicing and loan processing applications from its on-premises Disaster Recovery site to AWS.

The bank is on track to train all technical staff in fundamental AWS courses, with most staff also progressing to intermediate and advanced levels. From June 2023 to May 2024, over 1,180 employees attended AWS workshops and cloud fluency series, and 857 completed fundamental, intermediate, and advanced cloud courses. “Our AWS training adapts to the bank's changing requirements,” Anh explains. “It is flexible, and we make adjustments during the training execution based on feedback from instructors and personnel. Our overall employee satisfaction scores exceed 4.7 out of 5.”

To further drive innovation, VPBank hosted AI and Machine Learning (AIML) workshops led by AWS experts, attracting 650 employees and demonstrating AI/GenAI applications in banking.

VPBank also provided specialized AI/GenAI training for 200 C-level executives and mid-level managers, equipping them to integrate advanced technologies into strategic initiatives. The bank’s commitment to innovation extended to launching Winnovate, a competition supported by AWS that garnered 400% more submissions than expected, contributing to VPBank’s growth and innovation journey.

Beyond upskilling its employees, VPBank also worked with AWS to develop early career tech talent through a series of collaborative initiatives, such as the VPBank Technology Hackathon. This competitive, multi-month program challenged university students and developers to tackle real-world problems using cloud computing. Attracting more than 136 teams nationwide, the 605 participants received AWS workshops on topics like serverless computing, data analytics, and machine learning. They were also provided with architectural guidance and technical mentorship to help bring their ideas to life. At the conclusion of the hackathon, the top teams were awarded prizes and the opportunity to interview for internship and full-time positions at VPBank. Several of the participants were ultimately hired by the bank, joining the ranks of Vietnam's up-and-coming tech leaders.