Cloud-Based Database Hosting for Standard Bank on AWS

Company: Standard Bank
Industry: Financial Services
Company Size: 50 000+ Employees

About the Company

Standard Bank is one of South Africa’s largest financial services organisations, serving millions of customers across the African continent. With a history spanning over 160 years, the bank offers a comprehensive range of banking and financial products, from personal and business banking to wealth management and investment services. Standard Bank is committed to leveraging innovation and digital transformation to deliver secure, user-friendly, and scalable solutions that meet the evolving needs of its customers in an increasingly connected world.

The Challenge

Standard Bank’s UCount Rewards platform was previously fully outsourced to a third-party vendor, resulting in limited control over operations, security, and scalability. The bank identified several key challenges:

Security risks: A previous vulnerability exposed risks in the outsourced environment.
High costs: Outsourcing incurred significant operational expenses, with limited ability to optimize cost.
Lack of agility: Vendor dependency slowed down the ability to implement enhancements, address issues, and scale with demand.
Data fragmentation: While Standard Bank retained portions of the database, critical components remained with the vendor, complicating integration and management.

To address these issues, Standard Bank decided to re-platform UCount in-house, leveraging AWS to enhance security, reduce costs, and gain full ownership of the solution.

Our Solution

The project involved re-platforming the UCount Rewards system from the outsourced vendor’s environment into Standard Bank’s in-house AWS environment. Key steps included:

Front-end re-engineering: Performed coding updates to reconfigure and integrate the front end, ensuring a seamless user experience.
API proxying: Implemented proxy services for API endpoints to support connectivity and interoperability between legacy vendor systems and the new AWS-hosted environment.
Database integration: Continued leveraging the existing database infrastructure where feasible, while migrating control and key components into AWS-managed services to improve performance and manageability.
Security and monitoring: Incorporated AWS-native tools for observability, security, and secrets management to reduce risk and improve governance.

This migration was designed with minimal disruption to customers, ensuring continuity of the loyalty program while positioning the platform for future scalability and innovation.

Benefits to the client

Enhanced security: Hosting the platform in-house on AWS mitigated previous vulnerabilities, providing stronger governance and compliance alignment.
Cost optimization: Eliminated vendor dependency, reducing outsourcing expenses and enabling better control of infrastructure spend.
Increased agility: Internal ownership allows Standard Bank to implement changes faster, respond to issues quickly, and improve time-to-market for new features.
Operational efficiency: With AWS-native monitoring, logging, and observability, the platform benefits from real-time insights and proactive issue resolution.
Strategic control: The migration positions Standard Bank to innovate and expand the UCount Rewards platform with greater flexibility.

Technologies and Methodologies Used

Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon Forecast
Amazon RDS Aurora for PostgreSQL
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) A2A
Amazon SQS
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
AWS Backup
AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudShell
AWS CloudTrail
AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
AWS Lambda
AWS PrivateLink
AWS SDKs and Tools
AWS Secrets Manager
AWS Systems Manager

By re-platforming the UCount Rewards program from a third-party vendor into its in-house AWS environment, Standard Bank gained full control over one of its most strategic customer engagement platforms. The migration addressed critical security risks, reduced operating costs, and improved agility, all while ensuring uninterrupted service for customers. With AWS-native monitoring, automation, and scalability, Standard Bank is now positioned to innovate faster, enhance customer experiences, and expand UCount Rewards with greater confidence and flexibility.

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