AWS re:Invent 2020: Financial services: Navigating change while facing forward with HSBC
hello my name is frank fallon i lead aws's worldwide financial services team and welcome to the aws fsi re invent track which we're naming navigating change while forward facing forward and we'll have dinesh daswani from hsbc talking a little bit more in a few minutes about what they're doing with aws but before then i wanted to just give a quick preview of the of the agenda and provide a few opening comments the i'd like to kind of address how we see our aws customers and financial services navigating the change that's hit us all and how they're adapting not only to that change but using that to be able to help look shape the future of what they're going to be providing with their customers with aws i'll then turn it over to dinesh and after his comments i'll wrap it up now i've been in working in and with financial services industry for more decades than i'd like to admit and yeah we've we've been hit with a lot of shockwaves in the past but uh nothing in in my memory uh really compares to what we face this year with the covid 19 and the impact of the of the pandemic on our planet on our society and certainly financial services was impacted as well and we really were in a point where i think the world was looking at how how would we react as an industry and as organizations within the industry the letter to the shareholders from jeff bezos recently had this quote from uh the famous child author uh known commonly as dr seuss and while i imagine dr seuss when he wrote this didn't envision that it would be part of amazon's letter to the shareholder or part of a financial services presentation it really i think struck home what all of us are facing whether it be amazon or the financial services industry or frankly us as individuals and i have just been so impressed from a industry perspective how our customers have not let this pandemic and its devastating impact define it it has not let it destroy it but in fact it really has served in so many cases to help strengthen what the our financial services customers are providing to their customers i'll give you a few examples when this pandemic hit there was a need to get funds and assistance to folks as soon as possible and we had some customers working with the paycheck protection program and spinning up uh a platform that allowed them to get the funds to the needy folks throughout the uh the u.s commercial environment we've see you saw a number of our customers continue to be able to do risk calculations despite the volatility in the markets and make the best decisions possible with the using the reliability and the availability and resiliency of the aws platform we saw some insurance companies quickly move and create digital products for their customers many of whom were only could access those products through a face-to-face meeting we also saw a number of our customers make the buying process safer by devising and innovating and creating new features around some of our contactless payments capabilities and even the regulators are using aws to ensure that the bad guys aren't using uh this pandemic to be able to embezzle or or fraud the the the the entire system and as we you know go a little deeper you know we see that our customers were leveraging technology yes a lot of them were being used prior to the pandemic hitting but using these technologies often in a new way as an example being able to bring their workforces home work to work from home in a in a in a way that is secure and reliable we saw examples where major banks were able to move thousands of their contact center agents from the contact center to the home and be able to continue to help their customers which really provided a service not to their not only to their customers but to their entire national financial system we saw our customers use data in a new way and the volumes of data that have been created through all of so many different type of market activities have been able to be leveraged by aws and our customers using that to be able to create new insights to be able to continue to report on activities despite record volumes and we've also seen the use of ml and ai technologies used to innovate and extend and create new capabilities and products for their customers to address new uh new concerns and and new opportunities and so while as i said the the cloud is not new certainly we're seeing that our customers are compressing their time frames to leverage the cloud in order to move to digital more quickly in order to be able to create products in order to be more agile in order to be more secure and what our session is for financial services within reinvent is kicked off by dinesh and his to story about hsbc but then we will be able to we'll be featuring speakers for some of the most prestigious financial services organizations in the world and they will discuss how they're leveraging aws not only to address their current needs of their customers but building out capabilities products platforms that will extend for the next five or ten years or more so companies like jp morgan and axa fidelity investments venmo goldman sachs barclays fannie mae capital one a virtual who's who of financial services organizations around the world will be sharing their experiencing experiences with you so uh let i'm going to turn this over now to dinesh and he'll be talking about the details about how they've been working with aws thank you frank appreciate being given the opportunity to come here and and speak to the audience at aws arraignment my name is dinesh kaswani i'm the cto for shared services and cloud and i'm going to go through how we are driving digital reinvention of of the customer experience at hsbc a small introduction of of who we are we're 158 year old bank we have a global technology footprint we operate in over 60 markets and we have over 233 000 employees with 40 million customers in those 60 markets as well we also have 7 000 plus applications that support our employee and customer base now we use aws on a global scale we've deployed amazon's web services in five markets globally representing uk in ireland in hong kong in u.s and singapore with more coming soon and we look to expand into other markets as we try to meet local regulatory and compliance laws as well what are we trying to achieve you know we want to make the use of technology quite simple and with the complexity of the ecosystem that we have productivity has become an issue right we have multiple banking platforms we have teams that that are geographically dispersed applications that are geography dispersed and we operate in a very very highly regulated environment the customer experience is evolving rapidly as well where the confluence of mobile big data cloud services artificial intelligence machine learning and all of these new services are evolving to provide customer experiences that have never been seen before and how do we take advantage of solving and and taking advantage of training our customers while doing one thing that's most important that we should never forget which is keeping the banks safe and keeping the money that our customers give us but with which interests us with with you know safety and big concern now how have we embarked on this journey we were highly regulated concerned um we interact with regulators from over 60 countries quite regularly we we focus on governing all of the services that come on board straight from outsourcing privacy uh and cyber security implementing controls along the way we are leading the way with the number of regulators and working closely with them to set the framework for public cloud adoption uh some of the big advantages that we have are you know in scaling outer services are the the capability to automate and and drive compliance through automation and even driven controls and and that has helped us in accelerating our journey towards cloud compliance now this has enabled us to not just start digitizing our customer journeys and and you know enable better experiences but also improve developer productivity now the key to you know driving innovation and and making sure that the customer experience that that we want to drive a digital transformation is try and bring business and the technology teams together and work cohesively uh you know part of the challenge is also how do you drive innovation while trying to build new services and and you know we're trying to build global experiences as as a seamless universal bank for customers so our top priorities ultimately drive better engaging customer experience while increasing velocity and taking advantage of the capabilities that the public cloud provides us and you know one of the biggest advantages of of using aws has been the ability to test newer experiences with smaller sets of customers while gathering rapid feedback and delivering more dynamic and engaging experiences with incremental effort quite rapidly and and that has become something that's ingrained within our software development process as well now our cloud journey actually started about four years ago when we committed to using public cloud and you know as every uh you know large initiative the first thing we focus was on education how do we get our engineering teams worse in in cloud technologies how do we build a solid training program get some certifications get some skin in the game and and scars in the back but foremost and build solid security practices within the team and work with our you know our compliance and controls teams to build that into uh our cloud platforms itself one of the first you know programs that launched and took advantage of uh aws services or hsbc digital banking services where we enable messaging platforms uh to communicate to our customers and enable in-app based messaging as well as text-based messaging so for example in the uk 8 million customers they take advantage of the apps that enable alerting and messaging and we've so far sent out over 160 million messages in in the last three months just using that and and we've enabled machine learning and servers analytics using those capabilities as we mature in the journey we have over a thousand certified engineers today within the company on aws and we're ready to take the next leap of faith which is try and move our core apps into aws now the partnership um you know started with thinking about how do we not just take advantage of cloud from a technology perspective but also drive agility in terms of scaling our services so how do we accelerate some of the services that we are that use take us weeks or months to deploy on premise you know post experimentation and try and deploy them in seconds rather than months and how do we gather all of the customer data and feedback that's coming through at a near unlimited scale in the cloud with the ultimate aim of of a bettering customer experience what it involved also was devising new security practices and and governance into the use of cloud so automation of the security practices the controls that we provide we have a continuous compliance program that runs you know several hundred compliance controls on ongoing basis that gives us the assurance that as we scale our cloud services we're actually keeping our data secure our framework secure and developers from ensuring that they meet the controls as they deploy applications in the cloud you know security and encryption are baked into all parts of aws that gives us confidence uh when you know that when we put in real customer data that it is going to be meeting the promise that we made the customers earlier so right i'll walk you through an example of of a service that we recently delivered and it's been about a year it's a global service open banking is is live in 12 countries today there's extensive reuse we have millions of customers that use open banking that take advantage of the data and the connectivity between banks and millions and we have hundreds of third-party providers that take advantage of open banking in terms of connecting to our bank and using the third-party services to connect what we realized is as we built the framework around open banking the biggest advantage was to take that open banking framework and deploy it as an instance in any aws country that in any aws region that we wanted to go live in so it required minimal configuration change to onboard a new country and meet their open banking compliance laws a lot of technology goes into this this is just not about enabling open banking but also a set of capabilities and and technologies that we haven't taken advantage of prior so for example we use apache nifi on-premise that routes data to lambda and the business logic can be tuned to be country specific and the data can be stored in the country that the regulators require the data to be stored in and if there's an alert for example in in the uk with confirmation of pay as a service through open banking that alerts actually straight go through a mobile phone from kinesis in in the cloud um we have masses of data for example we do over 100 000 queries a second using aurora transactionally to support compliance requirements to ensure that the transactions going through uh have the integrity have the checks that we have to uh carry out which were previously done on premise in terms of compliance requirements so everything is secure end-to-end everything reusable and this framework's helped us accelerate us getting some of the benefits that we get and most importantly time to market as it has improved considerably we estimate that we save about 50 of uh our delivery time by reusing the core components of open banking what we don't have to do which we have to do previously was set up infrastructure from scratch set up configuration scripts from scratch and you don't need to do that anymore you don't need to rebuild all of that the framework helps you build all that infrastructure and the application itself is reusable what what we really like about this is the security patterns are adaptable as well and if there are newer controls in a different country it's a config change and it's fully audible the cost reduction uh is related to the resource costs but also as we scale up we take advantage of the cost years in aws so um this is something that that shows that you know as you commit to a service that you know you take advantage of multiple parameters here what is our our our future strategy uh we're looking you know really good from a scale and stability perspective we're excited by what we've built um our employee base our engineering productivity shows that our teams are excited by using aws globally these teams and and these digital capabilities are very uh directly related to our relationships with our customers we're seeing higher satisfaction higher retention rates because we provide services that connect us to the customer deeper than ever so we're looking forward to continuing to take advantage of aws services we continue to look to innovate for our customers across the globe and build our relationships thank you very much i appreciate uh giving a chance to speak here thank you dinesh great comments and so i'd like all of us to think through what dinesh had to say and really incorporate many of these suggestions into how we move forward together to help address the needs of our customers few suggestions one make sure you educate your workforce on cloud and the capabilities of cloud number two if you've got workloads in production or about to go into production utilize a well-architected review from uh from aws we love bringing our folks in and do that service to make sure that what you've built is architected uh correctly and securely i'd suggest experimenting with perhaps some new services and bring in programs from aws like our digital innovation program to think about new ways that you can serve your customers better and finally put in place a migration strategy that moves the organization quickly and ultimately in a way that can best serve the the needs of your customers and your organizations so thank you very much i hope that you've enjoyed this this program and look forward to having you be able to participate in the future programs with all the other financial services organizations
2021-02-09 18:58
