Al Rajhi’s Rize taps AWS for cloud solution

Al Rajhi Bank Malaysia, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the world’s largest Islamic bank, has launched Rize, a digital bank for Malaysian customers. In response to the increasing demand for faster and easier online banking in Malaysia, Al Rajhi Bank has chosen Amazon Web Service (AWS) for Rize, as it seeks an agile, scalable, resilient, and secure cloud environment. The bank will migrate its key IT infrastructure to AWS by 2026 to meet local regulatory requirements and develop a user-friendly digital bank for consumers and businesses.

Al Rajhi Bank will adopt AWS products and services, such as containers, databases, and compute, to deliver innovative financial services for Rize. It is building digital banking products for Rize using microservices with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which offers customers the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes applications on AWS. To enable more personalized services like payment services, the bank is also using Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

“With AWS, we were able to quickly build Rize, a mobile-first, highly scalable digital bank offering a seamless customer experience, within 12 months from conception to reality,” said Arsalaan (Oz) Ahmed, CEO at Al Rajhi Bank Malaysia. Conor McNamara, Managing Director at AWS in ASEAN, noted that AWS is helping more local organizations accelerate innovation using cloud technology to deliver financial services to Malaysians.

The launch of Rize comes after AWS announced plans to launch an AWS infrastructure Region in Malaysia. The new AWS Region will provide customers with the ability to run their applications and serve end-users from data centers in Malaysia. The commitment will be supported by a US$6 billion investment in Malaysia through 2037. AWS is clinching more deals in the financial services industry as neo-banks and traditional banks embrace cloud services amidst a digital banking wave. According to IDC’s Banking Cloud Trends in Asia/Pacific in 2022 report, 92% of banks in Asia Pacific plan to increase their cloud spending this year.