About the Client
Standard Chartered nexus (SC nexus) is a white-label plug-and-play Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution with a vision to redefine the banking experience for customers globally by digitally marrying ecosystems to banks. The BaaS model enables non-financial companies to provide customers with financial products and services such as personal loans, credit cards and digital savings accounts.
Sourced Group an Amdocs Company (Sourced), migrated SC nexus’ digital banking platform from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) to AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) within a tight timeframe, enabling it to meet the needs of a key partner. Some key achievements were:
- Swift Migration – A migration that would usually take one year was successfully completed in nine months.
- Regulatory Compliance – The new set-up complies with all relevant financial services regulations in the region, from data localisation to security requirements.
- Wider Reach – This development enables SC nexus to access one of the biggest online markets worldwide, with more than 196 million internet users.
Challenge: Executing a Complex Region-to-Region Migration at Pace
SC nexus was planning to migrate its BaaS platform from the AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region to Indonesia, having made a commitment to onshore its deployment there by 2025. However, the regulatory timescales changed, impacting SC nexus’ work with Indonesian e-commerce company Bukalapak for its new digital banking service, BukaTabungan.
AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region had only recently opened, so several services required by SC nexus were not available locally at that time. This increased the complexity of the migration, prompting SC nexus to look for an experienced cloud partner with a deep understanding of AWS and highly regulated industries. Sourced was engaged to handle the task.
Solution: Collaborative Approach Boosts Confidence and Enhances Planning
We worked closely with the application team at SC nexus as well as departments from Standard Chartered Bank, including its cloud engineering, network, and compliance teams. Weekly migration assessment calls were also held with AWS. This ensured clear and consistent communication surrounding the planning of the migration, enabling us to quickly resolve any issues that arose.
In addition to routine meetings, we held focused sessions to cover important areas such as penetration testing. Working in this collaborative way gave all stakeholders confidence in the migration planning and set us up for a quick and effective move from Hong Kong to Jakarta.
From a technical perspective, the migration involved a workload spread across 103 servers (four AWS EKS clusters coordinating 103 EC2 instances across three availability zones). Before it could proceed further, we had to identify and assess which of the required AWS services were unavailable in the Jakarta region. At the time, missing services included Kinesis Analytics, AWS Transit Gateway, AWS EKS and GPU instances. These play an essential role in simplifying cloud infrastructures for more effective, secure, and transparent management as well as providing capabilities such as automatic encryption. We architected compliant workarounds which met regulatory standards for the SC nexus and Standard Chartered teams.
Once foundations had been laid for a secure presence in the Jakarta region, the next step involved data migration for eight PostgreSQL clusters and data sync for a Cassandra cluster and two Amazon S3 buckets. An additional limitation in the Hong Kong region was the need to use AWS tested solutions/features for PostgreSQL cluster migration. This drawback led us to architect an automated solution for RDS data migration. We planned out the individual steps and executed multiple tests before the migration was initiated.
This overall process would usually take a year, we achieved it in nine months. The migration progressed smoothly and took eight hours to complete.
Outcome: Accelerated Migration Unlocks Business Opportunities Sooner
The migration was conducted in time for SC nexus to deliver a full retail banking capability within Bukalapak’s ecosystem. It is the first bank to deploy a BaaS solution in Indonesia.
Completing this migration three years earlier than originally planned provides SC nexus with a competitive edge. It also supports Standard Chartered’s strategic priority of scaling up its mass retail presence through innovative partnerships and generating new revenue streams through digital initiatives. This development has made BaaS a viable business model in Indonesia, enabling SC nexus to have the first-mover advantage in one of the world’s biggest online markets with more than 196 million internet users.
“Working with Sourced Group has been nothing short of great. Their support has been responsive and highly skilled. Sourced played a key role in helping SC nexus with the migration from AWS Hong Kong to AWS Jakarta with minimal downtime. We are happy to continue this great partnership.”
Kelvin Tan, Global Head, SC nexus
