About RHB Singapore
RHB Singapore was first established in 1961 through a series of rapid expansion and strategic mergers. For more than half a century in Singapore, RHB has garnered invaluable financial experience and transferred those insights of service excellence on to clients, helping individuals and corporations fulfil their financial goals.
RHB Singapore’s core businesses are streamlined into nine pillars, namely Personal Financial Services and Wealth Management, Commercial Banking, Corporate Banking, Business Centres, Treasury, Structured Finance as well as Investment Banking, Brokerage and Asset Management businesses.
The Group’s regional presence spans ten countries in ASEAN including Hong Kong. RHB Banking Group aspires to deliver superior customer experience and shareholder value; and to be recognised as a Leading Multinational Financial Services Group.
The Challenge
As a leader in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) financial services industry, RHB Singapore is embarking on an enterprise-wide cloud transformation journey to enable innovation, deliver exceptional customer experiences and enhance its competitive advantage in the region.
In April 2018, Sourced was retained to provide a platform on AWS that would meet RHB Singapore’s strict security and compliance requirements, whilst addressing and building out key financial services IT risk models.
The Sourced Solution
Leveraging its deep experience in financial services and its Cloud at Scale™ Foundations solution, Sourced delivered an enterprise-grade platform for the bank’s applications, consisting of cloud-native infrastructure and automation that helps the bank meet its regulatory and governance obligations with a minimum of manual effort.
Once the platform was in place, Sourced worked with RHB and an application development partner to deliver the RHB TravelFX mobile app – the bank’s first production workload on AWS. RHB TravelFX is a multi-currency digital card and app payment solution that provides a secure and easy-to-use platform offering competitive foreign exchange rates, real-time currency exchange, and the freedom to use local currency overseas. For this complex application, with third-party and on-premise system integration requirements, Sourced used its application pipeline development methodology to automate the deploy and release process. This allowed for multiple releases per day, greatly accelerating the intensive testing period leading up to the application’s launch.
The Benefits
Working closely with the RHB team, Sourced helped RHB to realise a number of firsts including:
- Successful delivery of the first cloud project in the bank’s history
- First retail service on the cloud in Singapore
- First digital application on the AWS Cloud
In addition, Sourced helped establish an internal RHB Singapore Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) to provide training on the AWS Cloud and modern DevOps practices. The CCoE has taken now taken over responsibility for end-to-end application support and delivery of new and complex applications. The bank can significantly increase the velocity of innovation through:
- Dynamically deploying an unlimited number of test environments to support different release and feature branches into the AWS Cloud environment, allowing development teams to deliver new features and applications faster
- Fully automated provisioning of both infrastructure and applications to the AWS Cloud platform using industry-standard tools and workflows. Enhancements to the entire DevOps process have resulted in increased agility and reliability
- Enhanced reliability, scalability and security of the platform with the ability to provision robust, production-ready test environments at the touch of a button
With these initiatives now complete, we are well-equipped to deliver new client-facing applications on AWS, as well as migrate existing workloads. Sourced has been instrumental in providing us with this capability. Having a partner with almost a decade of cloud transformation experience gives us confidence as we continue this journey and interface with key regulatory bodies across the ASEAN landscape.
Clara Lee Hui Theng
Head of Technology and Operations, RHB Singapore
Ian is the Head of Consulting for Sourced Group ASEAN. Based in Singapore, he has more than 10 years of experience in cloud transformation, and is a former AWS Ambassador and AWS APN Cloud Warrior. With a strong background in security, compliance and software delivery, Ian specialises in cloud transformation for financial institutions and other large enterprises.
