Category: Financial Services

To understand how a regional institution approaches cloud migration as a catalyst to deliver more agility and value from IT, AWS invited Mark Michaels, chief information officer (CIO), and Jeff McLauchlin, vice president of DevOps, from Columbia Credit Union to share their experiences embracing cloud technology.

Many central banks globally are researching the possibility of launching a central bank digital currency (CBDC). AWS has worked with customers in the financial industry as they design secure, resilient, and scalable critical financial infrastructure networks. In this post, we share best practices for central banks to consider as they move through the CBDC development lifecycle.

An Aadhaar number is a 12-digit unique identification number issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to every individual in India. Considering the sensitivity of the Aadhaar number and the potential implication of having one’s Aadhaar number compromised, UIDAI mandated the need for all Aadhaar and Aadhaar-related data to be encrypted and stored separately in a secure, access-controlled data repository known as an Aadhaar Data Vault. This blog post explains how government and private entities that collect, process, and store Aadhaar data for various use cases can use AWS CloudHSM from AWS to create an Aadhaar data storage solution that can meet guidelines provided by UIDAI.

With the launch of the new AWS Middle East (UAE) Region, AWS is releasing an Economic Impact Study that estimates that the new infrastructure region will support an average of 5,984 full-time jobs annually in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) over the next 15 years through investments of AED 20.1 billion (US $5 billion). The study provides an overview of existing and planned AWS infrastructure investments in UAE, and the economic benefits AWS investments create for the UAE economy. Read on for key insights from the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region Economic Impact Study.

The AWS Summit Washington, DC is back, May 23-25 at Walter E. Washington Convention Center. With a focus on public sector customers and innovation, the AWS Summit Washington, DC is a three-day event with more than 300 breakout sessions, chalk talks, customer lightning talks, builders’ sessions, and more, to help you learn how to accelerate innovation and deliver on your mission. Learn how to digitally transform to meet your organization’s dynamic needs, using the cloud. Register today for the no-cost event and read on for more about this year’s event.

China will launch its digital currency February 2022, and the UK and Eurozone have joined the movement for central bank digital currencies (CBDC), but it is the smaller, emerging economies that are leading the charge and have much to gain, experts have predicted. In a recent Global Government Forum and AWS Institute panel discussion, financial technology (FinTech) specialists noted it is the Bahamas and Cambodia who are the CBDC pioneers. The Bank for International Settlements said 86% of central banks are experimenting with CBDCs and 10% are close to implementing them, while banks representing 20% of the global population will launch a digital currency within three years.

Increasingly, central banks want to answer practical questions and make the technology choices involved to deliver a central bank digital currency (CBDC). They need a solution that delivers on their missions and meets the performance criteria required to support a stable monetary and financial system. To help organizations understand available technology options and see how cloud services can enable optimal solution designs, AWS authored a two-part whitepaper. Here are some of the highlights.

Government, education, nonprofit, healthcare, and other public sector organizations process and store sensitive data including health records, tax data, PII, student data, criminal justice information, and financial data. These workloads carry stringent security and compliance requirements to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of this data both in transit and at rest. Best practices for protection of data in transit include enforcing appropriately defined encryption requirements, authenticating network communications, and implementing secure key and certificate management systems. In this post, I demonstrate a solution for deploying a highly available and fault tolerant web service with managed certificates and TLS termination performed on customer-managed EC2 Nitro instances using ACM for Nitro Enclaves.

In an environment that is constantly changing due to COVID-19, increased competition, ever-evolving customer sentiments, and emerging technologies, financial services organizations are feeling the pressure to innovate. At the same time, the expectations for an effective risk management program have also increased in response to cyber threats, regulatory pressures, market fluctuations, and increasingly sophisticated financial criminals. Advancements in cloud computing are enabling organizations to improve their risk-management capabilities to get ahead of issues while continuing to deliver on and evolve their business strategy. Learn how the cloud empowers organizations to innovate and effectively manage risk—two enterprises that are often perceived as contradictory but can actually be complimentary.

One of the most difficult aspects in IT modernization in any industry—especially in highly regulated ones like government, financial services, and healthcare—can be getting data securely from on premises to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. In capital markets, moving fast while staying secure can determine an organization’s ability to modernize, optimize, and innovate with new technologies such as data lakes, big data analytics, and machine learning.