Santander Group's 100 percent digital bank now powered by AWS cloud

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that Open Bank, S.A. ("Openbank"), a subsidiary of Santander Group, runs on the world’s leading cloud for the most reliable infrastructure and the ability to innovate quickly and more frequently on behalf of its 1.3 million customers in Spain. The digital bank runs production workloads on AWS, including its website, mobile application, and core banking system. Openbank plans to expand internationally using AWS’s global infrastructure to increase redundancy and fault tolerance by replicating key systems across geographic regions.

Openbank chose AWS for its operational expertise, breadth of functionality, commitment to security, and understanding of the financial services industry, enabling the bank to innovate its business in the cloud. Openbank worked with AWS to migrate its mission-critical data lake from on-premises to a cloud-based architecture. The data lake now uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Lambda, and Amazon Athena for a more flexible environment that empowers Openbank data scientists and engineers to harness and analyze customer data so that they can make better informed decisions faster. In addition, Openbank leveraged Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to create a web and mobile front-end application that supports digital interactions with bank customers such as performing credit risk analysis, requesting new loans, and recommending investment strategies.

“AWS enabled us to launch a secure and reliable digital bank in a multinational environment, complying with European regulation in record time,” said Cristóbal Miralles, Chief Technology and Operating Officer at Openbank. “We are using the most comprehensive set of cloud services to evolve our customer service models, and help us meet the rigorous requirements of stakeholders and regulators who need transparency into and proof of robust security architectures that protect both our customers and proprietary data. We plan to leverage AWS’s advanced machine learning technologies like Amazon SageMaker to automate tasks related to financial operations and use more analytics capabilities to gain deeper insights into what our customers desire most.”

“Entrepreneurial-minded financial services organizations like Openbank are creating entirely new market segments on AWS,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “Santander’s Openbank collaborated with our industry experts to reassess their operating models, build anew, and implement strategies to accelerate product development, delivery, and upgrades in the cloud—all without compromising security and compliance. They are using AWS’s analytics services, big data capabilities, and machine learning services to make decision-making a science, rather than a guessing game, which has already had a major impact on the bank’s plans for long-term growth and expansion.”