Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that the Union Bank of the Philippines will migrate its IT infrastructure from on-premises to cloud by 2022.
The migration is intended to accelerate the bank’s digital transformation, improve customers’ digital banking experiences, and strengthen financial inclusion in the Philippines by bringing financial services to remote parts of the country.
UnionBank said in a statement that it will push for a cloud-only IT transformation strategy to become the first major bank in the Philippines to be fully hosted in the cloud.
When the migration is complete, UnionBank will run almost 400 mission-critical applications on AWS, including Finacle Core Banking and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, to further modernise its IT infrastructure, drive operational efficiencies, and innovate new services.
By scaling its SAP workloads on demand using AWS, UnionBank expects to reduce infrastructure maintenance and operation costs by US$ 1 million over the next five years.
UnionBank is also migrating over 900 virtual machines to VMware Cloud on AWS. As a result, it expects to generate savings of over 30% over five years and create a return on investment in less than 18 months.
In addition, the bank expects to benefit from increased staff productivity, reduced unplanned downtime, and increased business agility through faster deployment of new, externally-facing applications.
To accelerate its digital transformation by building cloud fluency across the organisation, UnionBank is investing in a cloud training programme for staff.
The bank is providing training courses designed by AWS Training and Certification to more than 500 employees, including both in-depth technical training for information technology staff and cloud fundamentals training for business stakeholders.
UnionBank uses Amazon API Gateway and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to build new mobile banking products with microservices that support any application architecture, regardless of scale, load, or complexity.
“The breadth and depth of the world’s leading cloud provider enables us to more quickly launch new financial services, including a mobile bank on wheels to scale financial inclusion in remote areas and help Filipinos everywhere to bank digitally.
Now, more consumers, farmers, fishers, and local businesses will have access to the tools to help better manage cash flow, making it easier to send and receive payments.”
said Dennis Omila, Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Operations Officer, UnionBank.
“By moving its infrastructure to AWS, UnionBank gains access to an unmatched portfolio of cloud services to deliver new financial solutions and experiences and solve meaningful customer problems quickly and at scale while reducing operational costs.
We’re excited to work with UnionBank to create an end-to-end digital banking experience in the cloud that will help support access to more financial services in the Philippines and enable fundamental banking services from anywhere.”
said Conor McNamara, Managing Director, AWS ASEAN.
