Standard Bank Group Selects AWS as Its Preferred Cloud Provider

One of Africa’s largest lenders selects AWS to accelerate mass migration, drive digital transformation, and enhance security posture in the cloud

March 27, 2019

Today, #Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that #Standard Bank Group has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider with the intention of migrating its production workloads, including its customer facing platforms and strategic core banking applications to the cloud. Standard Bank Group will leverage AWS services, including data analytics and machine learning, to automate financial operations and enhance customer facing web and mobile applications. The migration to AWS will take place across all business units, subject to approvals from local regulators, including Personal Banking, Wealth, Corporate Investment Banking, and Insurance, driving a more personalized banking and investment experience for customers.

Standard Bank Group chose AWS because of its broad and deep portfolio of cloud services, overall commitment to security excellence, and strong financial services experience. The South African Reserve Bank also confirmed Standard Bank Group can make the move to AWS while still meeting all current compliance requirements. Standard Bank Group will take advantage of advanced analytics and machine learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, to advance fraud detection and launch new business initiatives, such as machine learning-based advisor capabilities that will help customers make more informed financial decisions. As part of the move, an AWS Cloud Center of Excellence will be established within the bank, featuring a dedicated team focused on facilitating the migration to the cloud and building AWS training and certification programs to up-skill all employees. AWS and Standard Bank Group will also collaborate on building an education and digital skills program, to be launched across Southern Africa, to train the next generation of African cloud experts.

“Our vision is to be Africa’s leading financial services organisation and to achieve this we have chosen to work with the world’s leading cloud,” said Sim Tshabalala, Group CEO of Standard Bank. “For Standard Bank Group to remain a leader in African financial services, we recognise we need to adopt a cloud-first approach to our business. AWS Cloud #technology will create a springboard for Standard Bank Group, helping us to rapidly roll out our digitisation and data strategy to better cater to customers whose needs are constantly evolving. The combination of AWS’s rapid agility and high levels of security, combined with Standard Bank’s customer obsession and desire to constantly raise the bar, will allow us to build Africa’s financial services organisation of the future and to be positioned as more than a bank.”

“The cloud is transforming the financial services industry as organisations look for new ways to enhance customer experiences, and power their entire enterprise operations more efficiently and effectively on the world’s leading cloud,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “Standard Bank Group has been a trusted financial institution for more than 150 years. We look forward to working closely with them as they become Africa’s first bank in the cloud, leveraging AWS to innovate new services at a faster clip, maintain operational excellence, and provide secure banking services to customers around the world.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 165 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 61 Availability Zones (AZs) within 20 geographic regions, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, and the UK. Millions of customers including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

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About Standard Bank Group

Standard Bank Group is the largest African bank by assets with a unique footprint across 20 African countries. Headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, we are listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, with share code SBK, and the Namibian Stock Exchange, share code SNB.

Standard Bank has a 156-year history in South Africa and started building a franchise outside southern Africa in the early 1990s.

Our strategic position, which enables us to connect Africa to other select emerging markets as well as pools of capital in developed markets, and our balanced portfolio of businesses, provide significant opportunities for growth.

The group has more than 53 000 employees, approximately 1 200 branches and over 9 000 ATMs on the African continent, which enable it to deliver a complete range of services across personal and business banking, corporate and investment banking and wealth management.

Headline earnings for 2018 were R27.9 billion (about USD2.1 billion) and total assets were R2.1 trillion (about USD148 billion). Standard Bank’s market capitalisation at 31 December 2018 was R289 billion (USD20 billion).