Standard Chartered PLC (LON:STAN) and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) company, today announced a five year, strategic global agreement, which includes the bank running its strategic banking systems and customer facing applications on AWS.

Standard Chartered Bank is collaborating with AWS to drive its digital transformation and deliver new personalised banking services in the bank’s 60 markets across the globe. Using AWS’s infrastructure and cloud services across its entire business will enable the bank to be more responsive to customer needs and create new applications. Standard Chartered will adopt AWS to improve resiliency, security, and privacy, while meeting compliance requirements across the bank’s global footprint.

Adopting a cloud-first approach, Standard Chartered will use the breadth and depth of AWS services, including database, containers, compute, networking, storage, and security, to reinvent the digital banking experience, accelerating the design and deployment of new applications and digital services for its individual and corporate clients.

Standard Chartered is using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run significant applications and quickly introduce new services with the utmost security, reliability, and scalability. For example, the bank launched its nexus banking-as-a service solution and Mox, its new virtual bank in Hong Kong, on AWS and continues to leverage AWS services to add new functionality to both.

The bank’s global payments system, SC Pay, and core banking system, eBBS, are cloud-native services that use Amazon Aurora, a cloud-native relational database, to store details of banking and e-commerce transactions, including micropayments, resulting in faster and more secure transfer of funds with reduced cost per transaction.

Standard Chartered’s Financial Market business, which includes risk management, financing, and investment services, uses AWS to run algorithms that assess market risk and leverages Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to enable the bank to flexibly scale up those workloads during peak demand.

Bhupendra Warathe, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Transformation at Standard Chartered, commented:

“Adopting a cloud-first approach makes our vision for next generation financial services – like virtual banking, next-generation payments, open banking, and banking as a service – a reality. A significant number of Standard Chartered’s flagship applications, like our core banking system, eBBS, global payment system, SC Pay, as well as our new digital banking services, Mox and nexus, are already cloud-native. We look forward to our continued partnership with AWS to deliver new products and solutions to our clients across the 60 markets we serve.”