Singapore-based fintech company, UNOAsia announced on Thursday that it has built its UNO Digital Bank in the Philippines in less than one year using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) stack.
UNO Digital Bank is a "full-spectrum credit-led" digital bank licensed under the digital banking licence framework established up by the Philippines central bank, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).
BSP had granted a digital banking licence to UNOAsia in June 2021, along with other companies, as part of its digital payments transformation roadmap 2020-2023 .
Under the roadmap, BSP aims to convert at least 50 percent of retail payment transactions in the Philippines into digital form by the end of 2023.
UNO Digital Bank CEO, Manish Bhai, said that by building the banking infrastructure on AWS, UNOAsia was able to “meet the highest and most recent security and compliance standards set by local regulators and government bodies”.
With AWS, UNOAsia’s “technology is cost-effective and scalable to bring innovative, future-looking digital banking services to customers in the Philippines”, he added.
UNO Digital Bank adopted the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) to “rapidly establish” a comprehensive cloud environment, Bhai said.
The MAP is a “proven” cloud migration program based on AWS’s experience in migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud, AWS Asean head of FSI, Pete Murray, said.
“Participating in the MAP accelerated and strengthened the formation and scaling of UNO Digital Bank on AWS, helping offset the initial costs,” Murray added.
UNOAsia also worked with AWS Partners to deploy the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
The framework ensured that architectural best practices for designing and operating secure, reliable, efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable workloads in the cloud are in place, Bhai added.
“I’m often asked how we could build UNO Digital Bank in less than a year… AWS helped us rapidly build a digital bank interface our customers can trust, elevating the customer experience to help meet our customers’ financial needs at speed with ease,” he said.
Murray said AWS helped to build the bank in “less than 12 months with the highest levels of security and privacy management” adhering to the local regulatory requirements of BSP.
The UNO Digital Bank platform is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) from inception, using AWS Services like Sagemaker and Personalise for fraud detection and personalised recommendations, Bhai said.
The bank’s teams are creating frictionless and secure customer onboarding, and “delivering alternate data-based credit scoring in order to deliver great experiences for under-serviced consumers in the Philippines", he added.
